Tonight I saw HBO's film about the Rwanda genocide of 1994, "Sometime in April." It's a powerful movie, and it is especially impressive in making it clear how little the U.N. and the U.S. did despite extensive knowledge of what was happening day by day. As for the French... well, the film does a subtle but devastating job of showing Paris' sympathy for the wrong side.
As it happens, there is something that I and the other millions of people who may ultimately see "Sometime in April" can do other than feel guilty. We can raise holy hell about today's ongoing genocide in Darfur, a situation in which New York and Paris and Washington (along with Moscow and Beijing) seem determined, once again, to do little or nothing until it is too late.
The OAU presence in Darfur is completely inadequate to the task. U.N. action will probably be blocked by Russia and China. Today's New Dem Dispatch proposes an emergency NATO mission. That will require immediate and vocal leadership from the President of the United States, who for once has a genuine opportunity to show he really believes in a "culture of life," and in U.S. moral leadership.
Like my colleague The Moose, I believe agitating for action in Darfur is a mission that should unite all sorts of disparate elements of the blogosphere
http://www.newdonkey.com/Idea of the Week: Stop the Killing in DarfurThe Iraq invasion of 2003 was a very difficult and divisive test for the United Nations and for the international collective security it is intended to provide. But the ongoing genocide in Darfur is a much easier case, morally, politically, and militarily, and gives the international community an important opportunity to rebuild credibility for effective collective action.
No one, other than the Khartoum government itself, denies the slaughter which goes on each day, or that government's culpability for it. Earlier this week, a British parliamentary committee suggested that the death toll in Darfur may have already reached 300,000, or about four times the official estimate. The number of displaced persons inside Sudan has risen to nearly two million. There are now over 200,000 refugees in the neighboring country of Chad.
It's time for the countries with the will and the capacity to intervene and stop the killing to do so, in conjunction with the OAU force. That means the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy.
The United States can't offer much in the way of ground troops; our deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq have stretched our forces too much already...
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=131&subid=192&contentid=253263Blog for LifeThe Moose asks - is the blogosphere powerful enough to stop genocide?
Much has been made about the influence of the blogosphere on our politics. So, can the blogosphere bring its power to stop the ongoing genocide in Darfur?
On Sunday,Washington Post had a important editorial on the crisis,
"In western Darfur, humanitarian groups have been unable to venture outside the main town recently; in southern Darfur, a U.S. aid convoy was attacked on Tuesday, probably by the Janjaweed militia backed by Sudan's government. More such attacks could force aid organizations to withdraw from Darfur altogether. And yet the need is greater than it was a year ago. More villages have been razed; more coping mechanisms have been exhausted; displaced farmers won't be able to plant food this spring. Last month a U.N. official estimated that the number of relief-dependent civilians could grow to 4 million, roughly double the number reported last summer.
"The best shot at breaking this cycle of violence and hunger is to put a serious peacekeeping force into Darfur. But all sides are engaged in an outrageous pretense of seriousness. The African Union, which has provided about 2,000 peacekeepers when 25,000-plus are necessary, is infatuated with rhetoric about "African solutions for African problems"; the United States and its powerful allies defer to this slogan, partly out of a virtuous desire to see Africa develop its own capacity to manage crises but mostly out of a base desire to pass the buck. The Bush administration's policy is to draft U.N. resolutions and dispatch humanitarian assistance. But it refuses to spend real military or diplomatic capital to stop killings that, by its own admission, amount to genocide."
http://www.bullmooseblog.com/2005/03/blog-for-life.htmlSee...http://coalitionfordarfur.blogspot.com/
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