AMERICA’S SUDAN

The world is in an uproar over the Sudan. And well they should be. The president of Chad accuses the Sudanese of sheltering his enemies, and tribal warfare wreaks havoc in both countries. Over 200,000 people have been killed and 2 million have fled the region where Kikuyu’s who back the Chadean president are slaughtering Luo’s from which tribe the opposing candidate for that office arose and Luo’s are striking back at their past friends and old neighbors the Kikuyu. It is a scene of chaos and mayhem created by political nuances that must go back centuries. There can be no humane explanation for it; no reasonable argument for its continuation, but it still goes on. Eventually, I expect, both leaders will be called to account for fomenting and supporting this horror. Perhaps they will even be tried for war crimes.

Even President Bush has recognized the terrible nature of the mess and has labeled it genocide.

And yet – the world stands aside relatively quietly while the United States continues its invasion of Iraq. Compare Sudan’s losses to Iraq where over a million Iraqi’s have died since the first Gulf War – over 600,000 since 2003 and most of the others due not to fighting but to the destruction of infrastructure in the first war and the banning of trade and relief for Iraq between the two wars. Over two million Iraq’s have also fled their country and now live in squalor in host countries that won’t recognize their validity as human beings. There is no reasonable argument for continuation of this horror, either, but our politicians regularly try to make a case for it.

Yes, we now owe Iraq the courtesy of our help in putting their country back together, but we also owe them the courtesy of relinquishing claims to their resources that we have been trying to establish since the day we ran Saddam to ground, and concentrated effort to try and stanch the flow of blood and loss of security our destruction of their infrastructure has caused.

The same president who cries genocide about the Sudan has led the charge to cause even more deaths and displacement in Iraq. The same president who charges the leaders in Chad and Sudan with the crime of inhumanity to man daily stands proud in his self-proclaimed role as America’s “war president” and argues that continued death and destruction in Iraq is in America’s best interests.

Will criminal charges ever be laid in that direction? I believe they could and should be, but I also believe it will never happen.


Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle