Answering Africa’s Call

[MSgt213]

Did you cry during “Hotel Rwanda“? Secretly root on Don Cheadle’s nomination last night? Have you been wearing your green “Save Darfur” bracelet despite it not always *gasp* matching the rest of your outfit?

And when thousands of people died yesterday in Africa, did you even blink an eye?

Yes, it’s that time again. Time for the obligatory plea for the forgotten continent. What argument might work:

In the name of national security, we need to address the underlying contributors to the spread of global terrorism - “the lethal combination of corrupt or destructive leaders, porous and unmonitored borders and rootless or hopeless young men” - with more than just military action, yet we continue to spend more than 30 times more on military operations than “foreign aid that addresses the plight of the poorest of the world’s poor.” Right now terrorists are feeding people (and feeding into their desperation) while we continue to be wasteful and negligent, funneling money into an ill-begotten war instead of actually focusing on the war on terror.

In the interests of keeping our word, the United States needs to start making real progress in fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals set forth a few years ago. Alongside several other countries, we vowed that by the year 2015 we would be “giving 0.7 percent of national incomes for development aid for poor countries,” a commitment that could eradicate world poverty by 2025. Britain and France are already halfway there, but we putter along “near rock bottom at 0.18 percent.” President Bush praises his Millennium Challenge Account but the provisions of that vastly underfunded program, which “has yet to disburse a single dollar,” preclude those most in need from receiving any aid whatsoever.

http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=342#more-342

[Kire]

1. Did thousands of people die in Africa yesterday?

was it a spectacle, or was it all over the place just like any other day?

[applegrove]

2. Africa needs open trade policies throught the world. That is what

Africa needs. It needs the UN (and a well-funded UN). It needs continued debt relief. It needs the Catholic Church to encourage condoms. It needs the Christian Churches to be realistic and not encourage abstinence in girls who likely will have no say in when they get married or become sexually active. Africa needs more Bill Gates investing their excess millions in looking into pharmaceutical solutions to the simple diseases. It needs aid to be multilateral and not tied. Africa needs girl-child education. It needs for its common market to be enabled & encourage by the US & Western nations. Africa needs subsidized farming to be a thing of the past in the rest of the world. Africa needs a place for old 'leaders' to go to retire. It needs a common currency. It needs a way to stop brain drain - or require financial payment from immigrants who move to the West after an expensive education. Many, many things.

Thank you for the post.

[beanball]

3. Africa's needs

to recover all of the stuff that the Europeans stole during their plundering and pillaging of Africa.

[linazelle]

4. And, if you cannot garner a bigger response than this in DU, then

it's hopeless...there isn't more compassion elsewhere.

[angee_is_mad]

7. Unfortunately Africans are not photogenic

to the mainstream. I must make a disclaimer, before I get flamed. What I am going to say is not meant to compare one tragedy to another and it is not to belittle a people.

The Tsunami. Money has poured all over the world to help countries that were affected by this tragedy. The PR machines are having billboards with pictures of the children. Couples are hungering to adopt these children whose family were lost. bush extended the charitable contributations deadline so that more people would contribute. Two former presidents are traveling the country and the world asking for contributions. They even appeared during the super bowl.

The money money raise and still raising is awesome. It makes you realize what can happen when people come together to make a difference. Now Africa.

Sudan has lost millions to genocide. Aids is devastating the continent. Why can't we do the same for Africa that we did for the Tsunami nations. Why can't Clinton and bush go to Africa and put a spotlight on the problems. Why can I ride down the road and see the picture of a beautiful African child that needs my help.

Why?

[reorg]

5. some numbers

When the world's governments met at the Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, they adopted a programme for action under the auspices of the United Nations — Agenda 21. Amongst other things, this included an Official Development Assistance (ODA) aid target of 0.7% of gross national product (GNP) for rich nations, roughly 22 members of the OECD, known as the Development Assistance Committee (DAC).

...

According to the World Bank, overall, the official development assistance worldwide has been decreasing about 20% since 1990.

...

some common “myths” ...:

* Africa has received increasing amounts of aid over the years - in fact, aid to Sub-Saharan Africa fell by 48% over the 1990s

* Africa needs to integrate more into the global economy - in fact, trade accounts for larger proportion of Africa's income than of the G8

* Economic reform will generate new foreign investment - in fact, investment to Africa has fallen since they opened up their economies

* Bad governance has caused Africa's poverty - in fact, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), economic conditions imposed by the IMF and the World Bank were the dominant influence on economic policy in the two decades to 2000, a period in which Africa's income per head fell by 10% and income of the poorest 20% of people fell by 2% per year

...

In 1995, the director of the US aid agency defended his agency by testifying to his congress that 84 cents of every dollar of aid goes back into the U.S economy in goods and services purchased. For every dollar the United States puts into the World Bank, an estimated $2 actually goes into the US economy in goods and services. Meanwhile, in 1995, severely indebted low-income countries paid one billion dollars more in debt and interest to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) than they received from it. For the 46 countries of Subsaharan Africa, foreign debt service was four times their combined governmental health and education budgets in 1996. So, we find that aid does not aid.

http://tinyurl.com/4pa66

[chlamor]

6. Coltan, Guns and Cell Phones- The Congo

Now of course you cannot compensate for stolen dreams.
Do you hear the children on your cell phone
The vibrations of their screams.

Heart of Darkness
Isn't always what it seems
Are you listening?

The demand for cell phones and computer chips is helping fuel a bloody civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"The offer turned up a few weeks ago on an Internet bulletin board called the Embassy Network. Among the postings about Dutch work visas and Italian pen pals lurked a surprisingly blunt proposal: "How much do you want to offer per kilogram? Please find me at least 100,000 U.S. dollars and I will deliver immediately."

"The substance for sale wasn't cocaine or top-grade opium. It was an ore called Columbite-tantalite - coltan for short - one of the world's most sought-after materials. Refine coltan and you get a highly heat-resistant metal powder called tantalum. It sells for $100 a pound, and it's becoming increasingly vital to modern life. For the high-tech industry, tantalum is magic dust, a key component in everything from mobile phones made by Nokia (NOK) and Ericsson and computer chips from Intel (INTC) to Sony (SNE) stereos and VCRs."
<snip>
"Selling coltan is not illegal. Most of the worldwide tantalum supply - valued at as much as $6 billion a year - comes from legitimate mining operations in Australia, Canada and Brazil. But as demand for tantalum took off with the boom of high-tech products in recent years, a new, more sinister market began flourishing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, warring rebel groups - many funded and supplied by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda - are exploiting coltan mining to help finance a bloody civil war now in its third year. "There is a direct link between human rights abuses and the exploitation of resources in areas in the DRC occupied by Rwanda and Uganda," says Suliman Baldo, a senior researcher in the Africa division at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based nongovernmental organization that tracks human-rights abuses worldwide."
<snip>
"The slaughter and misery in the Congo has not abated since the country's president, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated in January. (Kabila's son, Joseph, was quickly appointed the new head of state.) Human Rights Watch researchers, working with monitors in the Congo, estimate that at least 10,000 civilians have been killed and 200,000 people have been displaced in northeastern Congo since June 1999. Rebels have driven farmers off their coltan-rich land and attacked villages in a civil war raging, in part, over control of strategic mining areas. The Ugandan and Rwandan rebels "are just helping themselves," Baldo says. The mining by the rebels is also causing environmental destruction. In particular, endangered gorilla populations are being massacred or driven out of their natural habitat as the miners illegally plunder the ore-rich lands of the Congo's protected national parks."
<snip>
More at:
http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/Articles/TheStandardColtan.asp

[applegrove]

8. They did away with the first elected leader in Zaire/congo to get at

the mineral in the 1960s. Russia was the only known source back 40 years ago.

[WillieWoohah]

9. The only real solution to genocide is military intervention

"We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" by Philip Gourevitch is the best book I have read about UN intervention (or lack of) in Africa's problems. He describes how the refugee camps dispensing aid became overrun with Hutu militiamen, who essentially used them as a resource to feed their army of murderers and carry on killing (who otherwise would have had to disband and go back to their villages after a couple of days). This would have been solved if the camps were secured by UN soldiers. A multinational task force of several thousand could have put an end to the killing there but the West was too reluctant to commit soliders.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but IMHO the liberal left needs to ease back on it's anti-war rhetoric and start supporting interventions in the same vein as Clinton's bombing of Serbia and intervention in Somalia.

How is food aid going to stop genocide? I know this sounds callous, but I'm just trying to think of what is the best way to stop it. At the end of the day if armed groups are massacring innocents the best solution is to kill them before they kill some more.