A very good piece on the major players in the region, US and China.


After all the U.S. government's rhetoric about Darfur's genocide, and all its finger-wagging over the inaction of other nations, it is an instructive irony that the forces finally emerging to actually address Darfur's ills are on the other sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. Indeed, the governments that seem mostly likely to walk the walk are in France, the UK, and - surprise - China.

Three years ago, the U.S. Congress harangued President Bush about not calling the Darfur crisis "genocide" until he finally did so. His administration then spent the next few years using the term repeatedly, bird-dogging other nations about their lack of action, issuing vague statements about the use of force for which the Pentagon has not done serious planning, strong-arming one of the rebel groups to sign a peace deal that made matters worse on the ground, imposing unilateral sanctions that had no impact on the culprits, and sending millions of dollars of humanitarian aid to substitute for effective political action.


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This is the diplomatic and political equivalent of low-hanging fruit for President Bush, as he considers how to begin shaping his legacy. If his administration can set aside all its posturing, roll up its sleeves, send a diplomatic team to the region, and start working multilaterally, a real success story could be written.

Too little too late for Bush. He had his chance and blew it, just like in other countries.

After all, it is Africa, no body cares about Africa. Only when it becomes politically necessary.

Even the U.N. is dragging it's feet after it commited to putting peace keeping troops in there. Lip service.

Do you think it has anything to do with the US and its stranglehold on the Security Council? I do.

The U.N. Security Council is a weak governing body at best. They very seldom are able to enforce any of the resolutions. It's just a venue for making political statements.

I think that is why the US is a permenant member, to keep all others in check and ineffective.

Three years ago, the U.S. Congress harangued President Bush about not calling the Darfur crisis "genocide" until he finally did so.

He could deny it all he want's but he was the last holdout. It was evident it was true.

Not all is as simple as the media makes it.


The Sept. 29 killing of 10 African Union peacekeepers in south Darfur by a splinter faction of one of the main anti-Sudanese government insurgent groups was shocking -- but especially so to those who have only followed the Darfur tragedy through the lens of activist, pro-interventionist groups such as Save Darfur or institutions such as the U.S. Holocaust Museum, which label the crisis a genocide.

It was shocking because it doesn't fit with the simplistic, mostly-without-nuance view of the conflict in Darfur that such groups have been putting out for the last few years.

Why have these groups -- which, after all, are far more familiar with realities on the ground than all but a few specialists and Sudanese emigres living in the United States -- offered an incomplete picture of what's happening? Because they know that in order to get people to care, they have to oversimplify. Even naming an organization Save Darfur is an oversimplification, in that it implies that there is an innocent victim (the Darfuris) and a group from whom they need to be saved (the Islamist government of Sudan and its murderous janjaweed militia)


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Things are going from bad to worse in Sudan. Bush's big program is busting out.



Helping bring peace to southern Sudan in 2005 was the Bush administration's finest foreign policy achievement. It is now unraveling, risking a new north-south civil war that would surpass Darfur as a political and humanitarian disaster.

The Darfur advocacy campaigns have familiarized the American public with the suffering and abuse visited on civilians in that region of western Sudan. The people of southern Sudan suffered no less during the years of civil war beginning in 1983. The successive governments in Khartoum had two weapons of choice: freelance militias licensed to raid, burn and plunder; and deliberate famine that starved southern Sudanese to the point where vast tracts of their fertile land are now depopulated. The stakes were undeniably high. Khartoum didn't want to lose control of the south, which has oil. But most of those who live in southern Sudan -- Christians and followers of traditional theistic faiths -- believe that their homeland should separate from northern Sudan and end generations of exploitation by Khartoum's Arab-Islamic elites. Over 20 years, up to 2 million southerners perished.


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Helping bring peace to southern Sudan in 2005 was the Bush administration's finest foreign policy achievement

Sounds like everything else he has had a hand in.

I think the peace deal that Danforth got everybody to sign was a good deal, but the prob is the the Bush Boyz did mnot follow up on the ddeal and everything is returning to normal.