Lebanon and Darfur

[cali]

I can't quite figure out how Lebanon elicits so much outrage here, and Darfur so little. Anyone able to explain it? I've tried starting threads about Darfur. Nothing sinks quicker.

How much do you know about Darfur? Do you know how many people have died? Do you know when the genocide there started? Do you know how many refugees have been created?

Obviously what's happened in Lebanon is awful, but it's not on the scale of suffering in Darfur. Where's the outrage?


Current Darfur Statistics
The death toll has reached up to 400,000 people since February 2003
More than 500 people die each day, 15,000 each month
More than 2.5 million people have been driven from their homes
More than 200,000 have fled to refugee camps in neighboring Chad
As many as 1 million civilians could die in Darfur from lack of food and from disease within coming months
80% of the children under five years old are suffering from severe malnutrition and many are dying each day
Humanitarian aid organizations have access to only 20% of those affected


http://www.stopgenocidenow.org/iact/resources.php

[Lerkfish]

1. KICKED AND REC'MD

[cali]

3. Thanks, Lerkfish

Sadly, I expect this thread to sink like a stone too, even though I put 'Lebanon' in the title as a hook. Somehow, nothing to do with Darfur holds much interest for DUers.

[Lerkfish]

6. FWIW, I think we are unduly influenced by the media, even when we

completely mistrust it. I think it frames what we are interested in by focusing on various things.
If all we saw on the news was darfur, we'd have more people here discussing.

this is why its dangerous to have state-controlled media.

[Lerkfish]

8. I should also add:

I think since this administration is focused on the middle east, that our outrage at the administration policies means we are also fixated there.

I would not judge DUers too harshly for that, myself, just keep bringing it up.

[Catherine Vincent]

2. There won't be any outrage until it's too late.

K&R!

[MrCoffee]

4. "Never again"...unless its Africa. KnR

[cali]

5. That comment

makes me so angry and sad- because evidently it's true. Even here.

[MrCoffee]

9. I forgot the sarcasm tag...

My bad. I personally think the 82nd Airborne should be deployed to Darfur. I thought that they should have been deployed to Kigali in 1994, but Clinton was vewy vewy sowwy, so our complacency in the face of the Rwandan genocide was forgiven. Makes me vomit.

[PA Democrat]

7. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette's top editorial today was on the Darfur crisis

What is appalling is that since Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick has left the Bush administration, there is NO ONE working on the situation in Darfur.

Editorial: Dallying on Darfur / Human suffering takes a back seat to other wars
Monday, August 14, 2006

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Darfur is another issue that has been pushed low on the U.S. list of foreign-policy priorities, well after the Israeli war in Lebanon, U.S. problems in Iraq and the difficult situation in Afghanistan.

The trouble started in 2003. No one knows how many Sudanese have died in this virtual civil war, but estimates run between 200,000 and 400,000. Displaced persons and refugees are estimated at a possible 2.5 million. The humanitarian situation can only be described as grisly; eight aid workers were killed last month.

There are some 7,700 African Union security forces in Darfur. They are overextended and will run out of money again in October. The Sudanese government continues to refuse to agree to United Nations peacekeepers to replace the AU forces, and no country in the world will send its forces into Sudan without its government's permission.

A theoretical peace agreement was signed in May between the government and rebels, but only one of three rebel factions signed. President Bush nonetheless received the leader of the group that signed, Minni Arcua Minnawi, at the White House in July. That meeting was presumably the payoff for his having signed the accord. The other two groups continue to fight the Sudanese government and Mr. Minnawi's group.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06226/713310-192.stm

[tuvor]

10. k/r

[countryjake]

11. Do you know the oil potential there?

I honestly see the U.S.A. complicity in what is transpiring in the Sudan now as being on the exact same level as our "reshaping" of the Middle East in order to gain control of massive oil reserves...create chaos, rant about "murderous regimes", send in the clowns of "international intervention", facilitate "regime change"...voila...funnel all of that oil profit away from the people whose lands it actually springs from while sticking it to China and any one else who may want access to sub-Saharan oil production.

When I see troops, arms, and "peacekeepers" swarming into Darfur, I will see US Imperialism on the move!

[Gregorian]

12. It should be on the top of everyone's list.

Thank you for this post. I spend a lot of time hoping that there will be peace in Darfur. There is little I can do aside from signing petitions and joining in on discussions. It's unfathomable that this is going on in a so-called civilized world.

[thereismore]

13. Not enough news coverage, IMO. A picture is woth etc. etc. nt

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

14. 4+million deaths in the Congo in the last 6 years. 31,000 a month.

1200 per day.

But, the Congolese, the Sudanese in Darfur, are Africans, black Africans, and thus unworthy of our notice.

America, to it's shame, spent 10 times as much, per capita, on Isralis, than on Sub-Saharan Africans.

http://www.unicef.org.uk/emergency/emergency_detail.asp?emergency=29&nodeid=e29

On 30 July 2006, for the first time in 40 years, elections are being held in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Whilst this signals hope for the Congolese people, at the same time one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world continues to rage, devastating the lives of millions of children.


The conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has already led to the deaths of over four million people. Every day, a further 1,200 people also die from either being caught in the fighting, or from starvation and disease; over half of those dying are children.

Children are bearing the brunt of the conflict. Repeatedly being uprooted to escape the fighting often results in their separation from family members, leaving children without protection. Sexual violence is being commonly used as a weapon of war and assaults on children and women have now reached epidemic proportions. In 2005, 25,000 rapes were reported in eastern DRC alone. During the same year, 20,000 children were involved with armed forces and groups, either in active combat or as cooks, labourers or ‘wives’ of the soldiers.

Education is a key investment in the future of DRC but at the moment children’s access to good quality education is being denied. Over 4 million children of school age, including 400,000 displaced children, are not enrolled in school, and for those children that do attend school, the quality of education is very poor due to the instability and to extreme poverty.

Limited access to basic health care, safe water and sanitation, regular outbreaks of epidemics as well as persistent malnutrition mean that ongoing humanitarian support for children in the DRC is an absolute necessity.

[pelsar]

15. yes you can figure it out.....

and i dont thing i really have to explain it, but i shall:

the israeli/palestenain conflict has lots of history, world interest, far beyond the killing in dafur:

we got jews, we got western democracy, we got european colonialism, we got money flowing, we got the western military industrial complex, capitalism, we got the mossad with all its conspiracies, we got israelis (a variation of the jew)..and all of this against the down trodden arabs, islam, and poor palestenains.

Dafur is in africa....where the poor are shooting at the poor.....where the "bad guys" are the arabs, (which would then interfer with the arabs being the weak in the israeli/palestenain conflict)-doesnt fit a good movie script.

[daydreamer]

16. But Dafur is not on TV everyday. We don't know who is fighting whom.

So blame the MSM. With little coverage, there remains little pressure for any action. Plus outsiders can do little to civil wars anyway.

[breakaleg]

17. It definitely needs more attention. I think the problem is that

we don't know the players and it's not a region that was in the international press before this started happening so we just don't know enough about the region.

The first we hear about it reports of civil unrest and it's sadly easy to assume that stuff happens "over there" often. I think that's the perception.

[Jed Dilligan]

18. I think the close association between the US and Israel

makes people more outraged. Nobody is claiming that Darfur isn't a terrible situation, but the blood is more on our hands in Lebanon. (Maybe even more than we realized per Sy Hersh's New Yorker piece.)

So while it's awful to stand by and let atrocities happen, it's even worse to cause them to happen. Since this site is primarily concerned with US politics, and specifically the crimes and faults of the present administration, people here are naturally more active in condemmning atrocities that are or may be directly the doing of Bush and co.

[Tom Joad]

33. Now that is a simple explanation, isn't it.

[countryjake]

19. Maybe this will help explain...

An Ally From Hell
CIA's close relationship with Sudan's government enables genocide there to continue
by Nat Hentoff
May 20th, 2005
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/index.php?issue=0521&page=hentoff&id=64218

~snip~

But now—thanks to a carefully documented report by Ken Silverstein in the April 29 Los Angeles Times, which has had far too little follow-up by the media—it is clear that the CIA, with the blessings of the Bush administration, is closely connected to the horrifying government of Lieutenant General Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, the head perpetrator of the ongoing genocide in Darfur: over 400,000 black Africans dead, with some 500 more dying every day, and more than two million, many in peril of starvation, turned into refugees as their homes and villages are destroyed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Official Pariah Sudan Valuable to
America’s War on Terrorism
Despite once harboring Bin Laden, Khartoum regime has supplied key intelligence, officials say
By Ken Silverstein Los Angeles Times
April 29, 2005
http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/terrorwar/analysis/2005/0429sudan.htm

~snip~

The Bush administration has forged a close intelligence partnership with the Islamic regime that once welcomed Osama bin Laden here, even though Sudan continues to come under harsh U.S. and international criticism for human rights violations.The Sudanese government, an unlikely ally in the U.S. fight against terror, remains on the most recent U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. At the same time, however, it has been providing access to terrorism suspects and sharing intelligence data with the United States. Last week, the CIA sent an executive jet here to ferry the chief of Sudan's intelligence agency to Washington for secret meetings sealing Khartoum's sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the administration, U.S. government officials confirmed.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights
September 2003
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/sudan1103/


Edited to add the Human Rights Watch document

[cali]

24. Yikes.

Thank you so much for those informative links.

[hogwyld]

20. Well, to the neocons

Darfur won't bring about the rapture that they want so desperately. ONly the wholesale attack and Armageddon can they fly up to their allah/god/buddha/stalin etc.

[rockymountaindem]

21. K&R

[question everything]

22. Thank you. I started a thread about a 24 hour news station

and abandoned it.

Last week, when the liquid bomb was exposed, this was the only thing that CNN was talking, as if the Israeli/Hezbollah war disappeared. During the last month of covering that was, there was very little about Iraq, except with the obligatory references to suicide bombers, and how many American soldiers were killed. Again.

And I was thinking that I have not heard anything about Darfur for a long time.

One would think that covering new for 24 hours (more or less) that every single topic can get at least five minutes. Perhaps at the end of each half hour they can do an update, or something.

This morning they spent a lot of time telling us that... Israel's Ariel Sharon is still in a coma, that his situation has deteriorated. Using top caliber reporters like Paula Hancock and Wolf Blitzer to repeat this again and again, and to note that, no doubt, the Israeli government has plan for a state funeral.

And every news conference of Bush is covered, even when he says nothing, his "open mike" chat with Blair, the Annan-Rice "kissy face.."

But nothing about Darfur.

K&R

[Violet_Crumble]

23. The answers are simple...

1. I've posted about Darfur before, but unlike what's happening in Lebanon, I've yet to see a DUer appear and try to justify what's happening in Darfur. Most of the volume of the stuff about Lebanon is arguments between DUers, btw....

2. It's Africa, hence the world's media tend to overlook it more solely coz of that. Yr question should be aimed at the international media...

I also notice that you only focus on DUers who have shown outrage over what happened in Lebanon, and not on DUers who exerted a lot of time and energy justifying and supporting what was happening there. Shouldn't yr question also be aimed at them, as I can't recall anyone ever doing more than whining: 'Why do you always pick on Israel?!?!?! What about Darfur?!?!?!' but then never actually discussing the situation there....

[cali]

25. You've got a point

People who post about Darfur as a way of taking the heat off Israel, and without any real interest and concern about Darfur, are being somewhat dishonest as well.

My frustration came far before the Lebanon situation, but it's definitely exasperated by it. The response to the deaths in Lebanon and the lack of interest in Darfur, do stand in contrast to one another, though I think there are some fairly good explanations in this thread as to why that is. Remembering what happened to the Tutsis in Rwanda, a mere ten years ago, should be a compelling enough reason to focus on Darfur.

I tried to start a group about Darfur here, and as I recall, I didn't get a single response.

[Violet_Crumble]

30. About Rwanda...

Yr totally right that what happened then is more than a compelling enough reason to focus on Darfur now. I read a really good book a few years ago by Samantha Power (sorry, I'm at work, so I can't pop into my study and see what the book's called but it's worth looking up) that contained a lot of background on the US administration's lethargy when it came to even admitting that what was happening in Rwanda was a genocide, let alone trying to do anything about it...

There's an extract from it that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly:

Bystanders to Genocide

In the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.

A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands.

Why did the United States not do more for the Rwandans at the time of the killings? Did the President really not know about the genocide, as his marginalia suggested? Who were the people in his Administration who made the life-and-death decisions that dictated U.S. policy? Why did they decide (or decide not to decide) as they did? Were any voices inside or outside the U.S. government demanding that the United States do more? If so, why weren't they heeded? And most crucial, what could the United States have done to save lives?

So far people have explained the U.S. failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide by claiming that the United States didn't know what was happening, that it knew but didn't care, or that regardless of what it knew there was nothing useful to be done. The account that follows is based on a three-year investigation involving sixty interviews with senior, mid-level, and junior State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council officials who helped to shape or inform U.S. policy. It also reflects dozens of interviews with Rwandan, European, and United Nations officials and with peacekeepers, journalists, and nongovernmental workers in Rwanda. Thanks to the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), a nonprofit organization that uses the Freedom of Information Act to secure the release of classified U.S. documents, this account also draws on hundreds of pages of newly available government records. This material provides a clearer picture than was previously possible of the interplay among people, motives, and events. It reveals that the U.S. government knew enough about the genocide early on to save lives, but passed up countless opportunities to intervene.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/power.htm

[cali]

36. "A Problem From Hell"

Yes. It was a terrific book. She's a powerful, straightforward writer.

As far as I was concerned, it wasn't Clinton's problem with screwing around that burned me, it was his, and his administration's, refusal to do anything about Rwanda- anything at all.

A book I highly recommend about Rwanda is Romeo Dallaire's 'Shake Hands With The Devil'.

[Meshuga]

53. Sorry Cali but...

...Darfur has been a big issue in the Jewish community from way before this conflict in Lebanon. There has been a lot of campaigning and action from the American Jewish community for a while about Darfur (way before the Lebanon conflict) and the reasons why we are speaking out about Darfur ARE NOT because we are trying to take the heat from Israel.

I think the 'Why do you always pick on Israel? What about Darfur?' complaint is valid because, sure go ahead and complain about Israel all you want, but why not show the SAME OUTRAGE about Darfur? That's the complaint.

Sorry to say but it is pretty much what Pelsar said below: "Dafur is in africa....where the poor are shooting at the poor.....where the 'bad guys' are the arabs, (which would then interfer with the arabs being the weak in the israeli/palestenain conflict)-doesnt fit a good movie script."

The fact that Darfur has not been on TV everyday is no excuse and people cannot project their problem for their lack of interest on the MSM. The fact that Darfur is not on TV everyday, in my opinion, is more reason for outrage and to speak out about the situation.

[Tom Joad]

32. What Israel did to Lebanon is US policy. I can't imagine not being

a very importan topic for debate and discussion.

[cali]

38. You're missing the point.

As I said in the OP, what is happening in Lebanon is awful, but what has happened and continues to happen in Darfur, as the world turns its back, is even worse. Not a thousand people dead, but hundreds of thousands, and over a million refugees. How can we allow this to happen only ten years after Rwanda?

[JeffR]

26. K & R... but

I'm not sure that the subjects percolating in these forums are an accurate gauge of our (mine or anybody's) outrage. The forums tend to get swept up in the scandal-du-jour, the latest assinine remark from a mis-Administration official, even the latest missing white girl in Aruba or some case in Des Moines of a driver leaving his pet rattlesnakes to die in a hot car or whatever today's non-news is.

As remarked upthread, the media's utter lack of focus and curiosity about Darfur is a travesty, one of many on their part. The United States government essentially doesn't give a crap about Darfur or the rest of Africa. Then again, they didn't give a crap about the Israel/Palestine situation either - other than their little bullshit Roadmap To Nowhere - and we now see what their lack of engagement has helped to occur there.

Personally, if I posted about everything I am outraged about, the volume of my ranting would lead to this site having to be renamed JeffR Underground. And I don't think anyone wants that to happen.:P

PS - A sincere thank you for keeping this issue alive on DU. It may not get the buzz that Tony Snow's latest stupid non-answer gets, but people need to be kept informed.

[JeffR]

27. Damn

I think I just killed a good thread.

[cali]

28. Nah, you didn't kill it.

You kicked it- twice, and I'm just glad to see people proving me wrong, and posting on this thread.

[IntiRaymi]

29. Because they are not above tossing a red herring into the fray.

Darfur, despite what is happening there, is really quite meaningless to the USA.
Put another way, Darfur is not a prelude to yet-more-GOP sponsored war (Iran).

[Tom Joad]

31. Are we rushing Cluster bombs to Sudan?? There you go.

You will figure it out, someday.
Why is Iraq a concern? Because it is US policy. Why is Lebanon a concern? Because killing children in Lebanon is US (and Israeli) policy.

[cali]

37. sorry, Tom

that's not even close to being a good reason to ignore what's happening in Darfur.

[SPKrazy]

41. No Kidding!

that's just an excuse to rag on about the same old same old

Darfur should get our attention

I'm as guilty as anyone

[scarletwoman]

34. Thank you for asking a very important question.

A couple of not-all-that-developed thoughts (because I'm tired and have to go offline soon);

My first thought is that the Lebanon situation presents a much clearer and more direct picture of the role of the U.S. military/political hegemon in creating human misery. Our made-in-the-USA bombs are destroying and killing right before our very eyes on the TV news.

Darfur, in contrast, doesn't present such a clear-cut picture of how our government's policies lead to massive civilian deaths. It's all connected, though.

All people in the world are being held hostage to the bloody-mindedness of the few who hold all the power. I don't know how to save the people in Darfur except by fighting against the hegemon in every way I can.

sw

[Clarkie1]

35. Why? The media. It's all about T.V. ratings and what sells.

"Hot" wars with missiles and lots of bombs are exciting, have a lot of action, and make for better ratings for the cable news networks. Wars with machetes are dull and passe, especially when it's all a bunch of black people in Africa.

Hot, high-tech wars are easier to cover, require less analysis to make for an engaging show, and give more "bang for the buck," so to speak...especially if it's in the land of Armageddon.

Kicked and Recommended.

[Jim Sagle]

39. It ain't nooooooze if it ain't about the joooooooos.

Africans are slaughtered by the millions and no one sheds a progressive tear. A Palestinian gets a hangnail and it's a global humanitarian crisis.

Meet the new left, same as the old right.

[cali]

43. oh, get over it Jim.

Thanks for nothing but an offensive remark.

[Jim Sagle]

49. I'm right and I think you know it.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

40. A see a couple of reasons for the disparity

1) The media - they don't seem to give a shit about Africa, and rarely report on it. Americans in general, and DUer's specifically, tend to gravitate towards the issues being reported on by the (wretched) media here in the U.S.
2) Armageddon - the fundies are waiting for the rapture, and they see the Israel/Hezbollah conflict as the start of Armageddon. When fundies get wound up, the media plays to that hysteria, pumping it up so they can increase ratings (and profits).
3) Oil - because of the strategic positioning of energy resources in the ME, news stories focus on that region.

What all those add up to is a media that blows up one story and ignores another, and DUer's (like other Americans) discuss the current events that are considered the "hot topics", even if we pretend to be above that shit. Darfur will never be a sexy story because it's poor black killing other poor black people. In the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict, US interests are at stake (at least according to the media).

We've lost our humanity in a sea of Reality TV, cheap entertainment and easy money. Many Americans don't understand and don't care about what happens to those poor people in Darfur.

BTW - K & R

[oasis]

42. The Sudanese government has agreed to admit UN peackeepers from

muslim countries. 16-20,000 or so. It was being discussed on the PBS News Hour tonight.

[NuttyFluffers]

44. A flame war does not grow from general agreement...

Darfur is horrible. It should be stopped. Sadly our US policy is showing its tentacle even there. We need to find positive, individual solutions to it, otherwise it is relegated to being too distant for us to effect - considering US (and world) policy will probably blithely march along.

Now how do we get 50 more heated topics posted from consensus?

[JI7]

45. because for some

they aren't really concerned about the victims in Lebanon but are more about pushing their anti Israel agenda. that's why you see articles pop up from years ago or things that have nothing to do with the current conflict trying to push some conspiracy theory. all the stuff from the worst being things like the lies aobut Jews not going to work on 9/11 and Media control to things like debating the existance of Israel.

and i'm not talking about ALL who criticize Israel as i am one of them. but it's one thing to do it by criticizing the current actions of Israel and even our arms sales and aid to Israel than what i describe above.

[pelsar]

48. its just not as exciting....

the israeli/palestenain conflict has so much more going for it, for one, the reporters on the israeli side (where most of them are) have freedom of the press, no threats on their lives, all the hi tech they need to get their info out, a population that speaks english and is more than willing to provide the appropriate sound bites...and given israeli politicians, they're always juicy and good for an editorial afterwards...

deadlines are easily met with more than enough human interest stories if nothing is going on (holocaust survivors son, now F15 pilot/murderer). More so we have the goliath vs david syndrom going on...and western guilt/ UN interference, we've got global politics,and you seriously cant forget that jews are involved....it may sound pathetic, it may sound absurd....but its there...and world jewery with their lobbies and money are also involved. (as well as arab lobbies etc).

whos lobbying for Dafur?

[bigtree]

46. The concern I express here is mainly about stuff our govt. is doing

our interests, allies, opponents, etc.

We've had petitions, appeals to get our govt, involved, but it's an uphill battle with this administration to just get them to acknowledge the problem.

I think all of the judging of folk's motives is amazing. So many mind readers on this thread. Can any of you tell what I'm thinking now?

[cigsandcoffee]

47. Because the oppressors in Darfur are ethnic minorites.

...and many people here are so scared of judging a non-white culture that they'll tolerate genocide before risking anything that might be construed as racist.

Israel is a safe target, mostly. You may get one or two folks calling you an anti-semite, but the numbers are on your side.

[pelsar]

50. a lot to that as well

and many people here are so scared of judging a non-white culture that they'll tolerate genocide before risking anything that might be construed as racist

i've seen that here....something about "brown people" (though i never could figure out what a brown person is)...as if the murderers in Dafur cant be judged by western standards because they are an "ethnic minority" in western countries.....

[cigsandcoffee]

52. I think it's a gross overreaction to the shame of our historical racism.

I hope it's something that's outgrown as our culture moves toward a more comfortable racial environment down the road.

[Throd]

51. Famine in Niger, War in the Congo, Darfur...

I am baffled as to why there isn't more of an outcry regarding these situations. Everyone knows it is happening, but no decisive action is taken. Just a lot of "That really is a shame, someone ought to do something about that." Cambodia and Rwanda taught us nothing. Ten years from now we will hear more feigned concern from some other unsexy part of the world that has plunged into genocidal misery.

[Meshuga]

54. Kicked

and recommended

[EvolveOrConvolve]

55. One more kick

This is an important topic.