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Julie flint & Alex deWaal,
Darfur: a short history of a long war. Zed
Books, in association with International African
Institute, 2005. 151 pages.
Gérard Prunier.
Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. Cornell
University Press, 2005. 212 pages.
David Morse.
The Iron Bridge (1998)
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It is Darfur again and
the misery goes on
By E.
Ablorh-Odjidja,
Ghanadot
Three days after
the brutal murder of African peacekeepers in Darfur,
Archbishop Tutu, the highly regarded leader of
conscience, led a council of elders on a mission there.
In tow also was President Carter, the perpetual
peacekeeper.
It is hard to fit
President Carter in any African leadership construct,
but he was there. Perhaps, after this junket, he could
earn a Nobel Peace prize like he did after Oslo, and
then there would be peace in Darfur, like there has
always been in Palestine since!
Indeed, we need to
dull our senses to believe that this hybrid council of
elders is necessary because our African villages, towns,
cities, parliaments and the AU organization itself are
empty of competent elders, so President Carter can act
as substitute!
Still, with great
respect to this council, the purpose of the trip is the
question to ask. Has there not been enough talk and fact
finding already? Peace in Darfur, this hell hole which
the Sudanese government has allowed to exist since the
beginning of this century, will not come through talk
alone.
Ten AU soldiers
have been reported murdered in the latest attack at
Haskanita, Darfur. Many are wounded and some are still
missing.
The AU, as usual,
is threatening action, which it will not take, instead
of asking how it got itself hoodwinked into providing a
fighting force that it is incapable of sustaining
without help from outside nations.
But to hear from
President Carter, it is as if the end of the conflict is
near. He reported the following from President Omar
Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan.
"He (Bashir)
promised us there would be $300 million in all coming to
the Darfur region in compensation, $100m coming from the
government, and $200m to be a loan from the Chinese."
Permission for
mirth should be granted at this point: But the question
is compensation for what, the lives of the 400,000 plus
African Sudanese who have been killed in Darfur so far?
A paltry sum of $750 per head for each dead?
You would think
money is all that is needed to bring peace to Darfur. If
so, then why not let President Bashir keep his $100
million, and the borrowed $200 million from the Chinese,
so he could assure peace within his own dominion rather
than accept this insult on the heads of so many dead
African Sudanese?
Again, Darfur is an
ongoing conflict. The UN doesn’t seem to see it as
genocide. And now that the AU has gotten itself right
smack in the middle, the conflict is conveniently being
seen as a tribal one as the latest report seem to
suggest.
The 157 AU soldiers
at the Haskanita outpost were attacked by “a large force
numbering up to 1,000 well-equipped Darfuri rebels.”
Note, the Darfuri rebels, the Sudanese Africans, are now
the bad guys, not the Arab Janjaweed .
Of course, in the
middle of a desert and in the dark of the night, optical
illusions do happen. A Janjaweed could be mistaken for
a Darfuri rebel, especially when the former is in
disguise. Hopefully, it will take another tour of the
Council of Elders to find that out.
But all may not be
lost. It seems Archbishop Tutu, the great freedom
fighter, would have been calling for war were it not for
his cassock. All one need to do is to listen to his
language during this mission of the elders, when he
called on world governments to speed up deployment of
the 26,000 joint UN-AU replacement force of peacekeepers
for Darfur.
"I am making a call
to people of good will ... for goodness sake, tell your
governments to get off their butts," Tutu said.
St. Peter will not
tolerate this outburst, but for an Archbishop to use
this language means his spirit has been pushed beyond
his human skin.
"It is unacceptable
that the AU mission is not better equipped. They
couldn't even evacuate the injured after the Haskanita
attack because they don't have military helicopters,"
Reuters reported the Archbishop as saying.
So the Archbishop
is mad. The AU can get mad too. Individual governments
can stand up to Sudan. At least South Africa can. So can
Nigeria or the ECOWAS countries. But what are they
doing?
Just listening to
Mr. James Kalilangwe, chairman of the AU peace and
Security Council explain future AU action is enough to
make your stomach turn. The AU, he said, was thinking
about “strengthening the camp defenses of the
peacekeeping force.”
Perhaps, with the
$300 million from Sudan now in the hands of President
Carter of the African Council of Elders; AU troop
defenses can be rebuilt and strengthened. Sadly, the
defenses can also be blown to smithereens by Chinese
supplied arms.
A lot has been said
about how easy is it is to ridicule Africa. The $300
million in the hands of the Council of Elders is one
sure way. Allow this writer to think that a lot can be
done for Darfur by banishing Sudan from the AU.
E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publsiher
www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, October 4, 2007.
Permission to publish: Please feel free to publish or
reproduce, with credits, unedited. If posted at a
website, email a copy of the web page to
publisher@ghanadot.com . Or don't publish at all.
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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posted 4 October
2007 / updated 17 March 2008
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