Words Speak Louder Than Actions
The situation in Darfur grows ever more critical. While the world wrings its collective hands, laments the intolerable situation, the deaths of hundreds of thousands, torture and maiming , rape of women and girls, displacement of millions, and does nothing practical to stop the situation.Not only has the United Nations, despite its mandate as the world's policing agency to serve and protect failed, but it continues to insist that the Khartoum government agree to permit UN peacekeeping troops into the country to assist the powerless, underfunded and barely-trained-and-armed African Union forces.
The conflict has spread to Chad and to the Central African Republic, as Arab Janjaweed, funded and sponsored by the Sudanese government continue to cross borders in their pursuit of their hapless and helpless Sudanese refugees. Camps set up to protect the refugees invite rebels, militia and bandits where they continue to harass, rape and murder.
UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland was refused access to refugee camps by Sudanese government officials. The refugees are housed for protection from ongoing rape, pillage, murder yet within these very camps the carnage continues. Mr. Egeland was informed that the camps represented areas too dangerous to visit. So much for refugee protection.
Two hundred thousand black Sudanese have been murdered, two and a half million driven from their homes. Sudanese militia target women and children. Armed men on horseback continue to attack, loot and burn remote villages in southeastern Chad, not only Sudan, forcing hundreds to flee their homes, while some 300 Chadians have been killed.
Yet the UN Human Rights Council rejected a formal move to allocate total responsibility for this humanitarian crisis to the government of Sudan. The Sudanese government insists its geography be respected, that it alone will halt the atrocities in Darfur, yet it continues to arm the Janjaweed militias and send them out to continue this mind-numbing human misery.
The Council, re-named from the original UN Human Rights Commission continues to be dominated by African and Muslim countries. Along with China, Cuba and others they prevent criticism of individual countries' human rights abuses. With the sole exception of pointing accusatory fingers of blame at Israel, the only state that regularly is singled out for condemnation.
The European Union and Canada demanded that the Sudanese government prosecute those responsible for killing, raping and injuring civilians in Darfur, bu the council voted 22 - 20 against the resolution, despite that the United Nations has named the situation in Sudan as the world's most horrendous humanitarian disaster.
However, the council did vote 25 - 11 (10 abstaining) to approve the council's African group resolution that all parties to the conflict be called upon "to put an immediate end to the ongoing violations of human rights and international humanitarian law with a special focus on vulnerable groups, including women and children".
That and fifty cents will gain you entrance to the future memorial within the United Nations mourning the horrible deaths of countless civilians, the displacement of millions, the ongoing degredation of humankind in Sudan.
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, November 29, 2006
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