The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka
Tens of thousands of detained refugees from the war in Sri Lanka are threatened by the imminent arrival of monsoon rains in the north of the country, according to an internal United Nations document.
The UN believes that about 66,000 people held in the vast Menik Farm internment camp since May face a humanitarian disaster when the rains start, bringing the spectre of disease. Officials have urged the government to move those whose tents are most likely to be flooded by a mixture of rain and sewage. (Full)
Something in that picture hit me in the face. These are not refugees, but Internally Displaced People (IDPs). Refugees are people driven from their homes to cross a border, "hosted" on foreign soil.
The ethnic Tamil population locked up behind barbed wire and sharpened sticks as fences, are Sri Lankan civilians, on Sri Lanka soil. They were first held as human shields by the LTTE (the "Tamil Tigers") during the last weeks of the civil war, and are now kept as prisoners by the government.
What kind of government locks up tens of thousands of their own civilians in inhumane circumstances? Maybe this video explains what government we are dealing with here...
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And when one UN official spoke up in the press about the condition of children in the camps, he was expelled from the country.
According to the latest OCHA humanitarian report, "253,567 people are accommodated in temporary camps" across Northern Sri Lanka. Since the conflict only "7,835 people have been released from temporary camps"...
Picture courtesy David Gray/Reuters. Video discovered via Stop Genocide. Read the full post...
Jihad on horseback
Two years ago, Al Arabiya producer Nabil Kassem was asked to put together a documentary film on Darfur.
What he witnessed there, and recorded in this film, were scenes of unspeakable brutality and untold suffering.
The movie never made it to the airwaves. That is why we publish it on our blog.
If you are interested in Darfur, check out Darfur Now!
More on The Road about Darfur, Sudan and genocide
Video courtesy europenews.dk
What if a genocide indictment would lead to another genocide?
[i-darfur refugee]
The Sudanese president Al-Bashir got indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the country's western Darfur region. By now, everyone knows.
The international community, and the aid organisations working inside Sudan were weary of upcoming indictment since months.
Now the Sword of Damocles has fallen, they are dealing with the consequences: Sudan accused aid agencies of passing on information to the ICC and first expelled 10 NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations), followed by another three.
The impact goes beyond the expelled Darfur-based aid agencies themselves and their relief programmes. Many of these NGOs are implementing partners of other -often larger organisations-, who themselves were not expelled.
Concretely, this means that for non-expelled organisations, providing aid relief in Darfur will become even more challenging than it already was, with the security problems and logistical problems. More challenging, if not impossible for what is the largest humanitarian operation in the world.
So no wonder the aidworkers' blogosphere has been abuzz today on the ICC indictment and its consequences for the humanitarian relief efforts in Darfur. Check what Michael, Harry, Thirsty Palmetto, Paul, Scott, Peter and Rob have to say. (and check AidBlogs for more).
Add to that, what Rob Crilly, a reporter currently in Darfur, wrote on his blog a few days ago:
Today I met families who fled the fighting in Muhajiriya (..) One of them was Mariam Ahmed Abu. (..) She had survived six years of war but left when she realised she no longer had any children left to care for her. (..)All of that combined makes me think in how far the ICC indictment by itself will not cause a new genocide. Not one executed by AK47s and bombs dropped from helicopters, but a hidden genocide caused simply by blocking aid to flow to Darfur... Would we then have killed in the name of justice? Murdered those we should have protected?
She hadn't heard of the ICC until I asked her about it and I'm starting to think that taking Bashir to the Hague will be more of a victory for activists far away from Sudan than for the people stuck in this miserable war.
More on The Road about Darfur and Sudan.
By the way, if you have a high bandwidth Internet connection, you can watch "Darfur now", the movie online, right here on the The Road.
Picture courtesy Britolam.org Read the full post...
Wanted for war crimes: the Sudanese president.
[i-bashir:wanted for war crimes]
It's done. The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.
Al-Bashir is charged on two counts of war crimes and five counts of crimes against humanity. This makes him a suspected criminal wanted in the 108 nations who ratified the ICC's Rome Statute. The US is not one of them, by the way, since Bush "unsigned" the US back in 2002.
Bashir is the first head of state to be indicted by the ICC while still in office. (Full)
ICC Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo said Bashir masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawah groups, on account of their ethnicity. "His motives were largely political, his alibi was a ‘counter-insurgency’, his intent was genocide". (Full)
While this is bad news for anyone in the world trying to get away with genocide, even within their own national territorial borders, here is a dark after-thought: Why would this happen for the Sudanese president and not for the leaders of Hamas and Israel who caused the suffering of Gaza civilians. Israel surely scored extra points for a criminal case due to its use of phosphorous bombs and targeting aid convoys, UN facilities and civilians.
How about indicting Bush and his gang on the basis of crimes against humanity? After all, they invaded a country causing thousands of deaths, millions of displaced, and dragging a whole region into violent turmoil? Unilaterally and on basis of forged evidence.
PS: Keep an eye on my predictions on how the situation will evolve inside Sudan.
Update March 5: Trouble already starts: Sudan expels 10 aid agencies
(more updates in the side column)
Discovered via The Road Daily.
Picture courtesy Antony Njuguna/Reuters
Picks of the week: Hubble, GigaPan and The Hungersite
deep space[i-deep space]
Here are the interesting links I harvested this week:
- Boston.com shows some of the amazing pictures from the Hubble telescope. Like the one above: the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: Astronomers pointed Hubble at a tiny, relatively empty part of our sky (only a few stars from the Milky Way visible), and created an exposure nearly 12 days long over a four-month period. They found thousands of galaxies ranging from 1 to 13 billion light-years away from Earth. Each galaxy is a home to billions of stars.
- The Enough Project is helping to build a permanent constituency to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity.
- AndFunForAll features many bitter-sweet random pictures collected from here, there and everywhere.
- The HungerSite allows you to "donate with a click" for their causes: hunger, breast cancer, children's health, the rainforest, literacy and animal shelters.
- And last but not least: Gigapan is a project supported by a team at Carnegie Mellon University, promoting a camera robot. The unit, which can be used with almost any digital camera, costs just under $300, but the “stitching” software that creates the signature zoom & pan panoramas, is free. The result are megapictures where you can zoom up to incredible details. Have a look and get hooked. (discovered via Janet from TrackerNews)
Picture courtesy Boston.com Read the full post...
Rumble: Darfur Now!
"Darfur Now" is not just a factual movie. It is an in-your-face call to action for people everywhere to help end the crisis in Darfur. For the first time in history, the US Government has declared a genocide while it is ongoing, and that is a bad sign.
The movie shows the struggles and achievements of six very different individuals who bring to light the situation in Darfur and the need to get involved:
A UCLA graduate in Los Angeles (CA), a Darfurian woman who joined the rebel forces, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, a UN humanitarian on the ground in Sudan, an internationally known actor and activist, and finally to a community leader in a West Darfur refugee camp.
The film portrays the heroic efforts of six people responding to a humanitarian tragedy unfolding before our eyes. (More)
The official trailer can also be found on YouTube
If you have a high bandwidth Internet connection, you can watch the full movie online here.
More on The Road about Darfur, Sudan and genocide
Read the full post...
News: US presidential candidates united in support of Darfur
candidates[i-candidates]
There don't seem to be many issues that the US presidential candidates Clinton, Obama and McCain agree upon, but one which caught my eye: their stand against Sudan and the genocide in Darfur.
Extract from their statement:
After more than five years of genocide, the Sudanese government and its proxies continue to commit atrocities against civilians in Darfur. This is unacceptable to the American people and to the world community.
We deplore all violence against the people of Darfur. There can be no doubt that the Sudanese government is chiefly responsible for the violence and is able to end it. We condemn the Sudanese government’s consistent efforts to undermine peace and security, including its repeated attacks against its own people and the multiple barriers it has put up to the swift and effective deployment of the United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force. We further condemn the Sudanese government’s refusal to adhere to the terms of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the conflict in southern Sudan. (Full)
More posts on the Road about Darfur
Picture courtesy Save Darfur
Rumble: Translator of Nightmares
link[i-link]I read hundreds of articles and blog entries about Darfur. Few have impacted me as much as this article, covering a book, "The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur" written by Daoud Hari.
Daoud Hari is a Dafur tribes man who assisted journalists travelling in his region as a translator. A translator of horror stories.
| link[i-link]Sleepless during nights of exile in Chad, Daoud Hari stared at cracks in his room's mud walls. The lines formed random shapes that reminded him of drawings from thousands of years ago -- of horned beasts, of women, men and children. He had seen them in the cool mountain caves of Darfur, where he played as a boy. They triggered an urge to sketch scenes of the savagery and starvation he had witnessed in the once-tranquil lands of his childhood. During those uneasy nights, he picked up pencil and paper to turn his torment into tolerable numbness. He drew the woman who had hanged herself from a tree with her shawl because she could not feed her children. Hari had found their tiny corpses around her, their skin like "delicate brown paper, so wrinkled." He drew the story he had heard of a militiaman lowering his bayonet into the belly of a 4-year-old girl as she ran toward him, impaling her. The gunman pranced around as her blood drained down upon him. He remembered the girl's father, his sobbing, his horror, his shock: "What was he? A man? A devil? He was painted red with my little girl's blood and he was dancing. What was he?" His wakeful consciousness felt the pain of these images. His drawings, he says, were "stick pictures of scenes I needed to get out of my head. History. History. History. The people. The little girl. The woman," he says in his memoir, "The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur." (Full) |
Here is an interview with Daoud Hari on BBC:
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More posts on The Road about Darfur.
More recommended books from The Road.
Picture courtesy Jahi Chikwendiu (The Washington Post) Read the full post...
News: Sudan - From the 1994 famine to five years of Darfur. What is the solution?
This photo by Kevin Carter won the “Pulitzer Prize” in 1994 and became a symbol of the Sudan famine at the time. The picture depicts stricken girl crawling towards an United Nations camp, located a kilometer away. The vulture is waiting for the child to die so that it can eat her.
This picture shocked the whole world. No one -including the photographer- knows what happened to the child.
Here is the story behind the picture:
In 1993 Carter headed north of the border with [his colleague] Silva to photograph the rebel movement in famine-stricken Sudan. To make the trip, Carter had taken a leave from the Weekly Mail and borrowed money for the air fare. Immediately after their plane ) touched down in the village of Ayod, Carter began snapping photos of famine victims. Seeking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death, he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried. "He was depressed afterward," Silva recalls. "He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter." (Full story)
Three months later Kevin Carter committed suicide.
This was Sudan in 1994. We are now 2008. Five years into Sudan's Darfur conflict. The humanitarian situation is just as desperate. Maybe with less famine, but with just as much despair, as I wrote in several posts about Darfur over the past year.
Many, including celebrities like George Clooney (watch his video diary), Mia Farrow (Pictures and video), Angelina Jolie (Articles), Steven Spielberg (Article) and others have done efforts to raise the awareness over the problems in Darfur.
There are groupings like the "Save Darfur Coalition", an alliance of over 180 advocacy and humanitarian organizations representing 130 million people, and the Darfur Genocide movement. Amesty International created Eyes on Darfur.
Numerous fundraising websites (like The Darfur Wall), campaigning, video advocacy and education , awareness sites and Online Info Centers were created.
Musicians made songs like Living Darfur. And there is even a game (Darfur is Dying) created to advocate the Darfur issues.
Public pressure was raised against the countries in alliance with the Sudan government, focusing lately on China and its hosting of the Olympics.
Athletes, normal citizens, students, food lovers and bloggers on a global and a local level united to raise awareness and increase pressure on the Sudanese government.
You can buy items online through Yahoo! to show your support and you can even see how each US legislator scores on his or her support for Darfur.
Many governments responded with pressure on Sudan and several UN resolutions condemned the Darfur genocide (Overview).
The African Union sent troops, and UN Peacekeepers were deployed, eventually merging into one, called UNAMID.
And still, despite all of this, peace talks have failed to get off the ground, the United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission will not be fully deployed for months to come, and two-thirds of Darfur's population is dependent on the world's largest aid operation.
"The situation is not better than it was five years ago," says Auriol Miller, head of Oxfam in Sudan. "We would still say the situation is getting worse. Humanitarian workers are being targeted and attacked (see this post) in a way that has got increasingly worse over the last few years."
A BBC reporter recently wrote:
"When I last visited the remote, arid region in November, destitute refugees lined up at the Abu Shouk camp, desperate to tell their stories so the world could find out what had happened to them.
They spoke of toddlers being burnt alive in villages as men on horseback razed their houses to the ground; of women being raped as they fled their homes looking for safety in the early stages of the conflict.
At night, people said they still found it hard to sleep - terrified of being killed while in their beds. (Full)
So, if everything else fails, what helps? What is the solution for Darfur? What is the solution for Sudan?
Darfur refugees[i-Darfur refugees]
More posts on The Road, about Darfur and Sudan.
Pictures courtesy Worldfamousphotos.com and WFP.
What set me thinking: Iqbal Latif
Read the full post...
News: Ethiopia's forgotten war
ogaden-transhumance_w[i-ogaden-transhumance_w]
Ridwan Hassan Sahid awoke under a pile of corpses to a pricking sensation on her face. Ants were biting her eyelids and the inside of her mouth.
The pain, however, brought relief to the 17-year-old. "I thought, 'I'm alive,' " she thought as blood oozing from rope burns around her neck. Fearing that the Ethiopian soldiers who had left her for dead in a roadside ditch would return, she brushed away the ants and shut her eyes, then slipped back into unconsciousness.
The brutal assault and her escape mark a chilling story to emerge from an unfolding but hidden tragedy in eastern Ethiopia.
Ever since exiting colonialists arbitrarily stuck a triangle-shaped wedge of land with 4 million ethnic Somalis inside Ethiopia's border, violence and suffering have plagued the region. Now, many of them have been caught up in a nasty war between the Ethiopian government and a separatist group known as the Ogaden National Liberation Front, which gets little media attention. (Full)
Picture courtesy Cristina Alaman (Interaction.org). Source: International Aidworkers Today
Rumble: Darfur Now! - The Full Movie
Here is the full 1h37m "Darfur Now!" movie. This .wmv version is 426 Mbyte so - you need a highspeed Internet connection, and a bit of patience as the file downloads.
It requires the ActiveX plugin for your browser and is best viewed with Firefox.
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Be patient as the file downloads! It might take up to 10 minutes before you see anything in the videoviewer
Movie courtesy GratefulChild.org
News: Darfur. Do We Still Care?
How many more movies and documentaries are to be shown before the world has the courage to change anything about the situation in Darfur? This video shows why we should care!
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For updated humanitarian news, check out The Other World News Read the full post...
News: China, the West and Darfur: Why Do We Still Buy This Shit?
April 8, 2007.
link[i-link]1. Darfur According to the Chinese State Media: "Stable and Natural"
Reuters Alertnet reports:
"A Chinese government delegation visited refugee camps and met officials in western Sudan's strife-torn Darfur province to "get acquainted" with the situation there, Chinese state media reported on Sunday.
More than 200,000 people are believed to have died in Darfur and some 2.5 million have been driven from their homes into squalid camps since ethnic tensions erupted into revolt in 2003.
The United States and other Western powers have sought to authorise U.N. peacekeepers to quell violence in Darfur, where government-backed militia have been fighting rebel forces. African Union troops have failed to stop massacres.
China, which buys much of Sudan's oil and wields veto power over U.N. resolutions, is facing rising criticism from Western governments and rights campaigners for having rejected U.N. forces without Khartoum's agreement.
On Saturday the delegation, lead by Beijing government envoy Zhai Juan, went to Abu Shouk Camp, in North Darfur province, and met provincial governor Youssef Kibir, Xinhua news agency said.
"Administrative officials said that life of some 50,000 internally displaced people (at the camp) was stable and natural," Xinhua reported.
Continuing their four-day official visit, the delegation also visited a refugee camp with 14,000 people in Nyala, South Darfur province, and met provincial governor Al-Haj Atta al-Mannan Idris.
Idris said the general situation was "stable and improving", but "sporadic fighting" had occurred between rebel factions and tribes in the recent period, Xinhua added.
Last week Chinese Defence Minister Cao Gangchuan offered visiting Sudanese Joint Chief of Staff, Haj Ahmed El Gaili, stronger military cooperation while also urging that Sudan consider a peace proposal put forward by the now retired U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan.
"
2. Sudan and China: an "OW"-relationship: "Oil out, Weapons in."
(Also called a "win-win relationship"...)
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, "China takes 64 percent of Sudan's oil exports". The same report states that "China has sold the Islamic government in Khartoum weapons and $100 million worth of Shenyang fighter planes, including twelve supersonic F-7 jets. Experts say any military air presence exercised by the government—including the helicopter gunships reportedly used to terrorize civilians in Darfur—comes from China."
China is one of Sudan's major sources of weapons, says a BBC report.
3. So, we in the West, get good scores on this one?
Nah, don't think so.. The media reports cited above might be allied to the West and Western politics, and are all to happy to report China's debatable interest in oil import from and weapons export to Sudan. Because... well, because it is China who gets the oil and the business, and not the West... So let's relativate it a bit:
link[i-link]When last year, the UN Security Council is debated a US draft resolution on the Sudan crisis, based on colliding views whether a genocide is or is not happening in Darfur, the issue of Sudan's oil is became a key factor. If an oil export embargo was approved, China and India would have lost their influence over Sudan's vast oil reserves and a Khartoum regime change would open up these resources to the West. The US is in favour of sanctions (hey I wonder why!), China is against (surprise!).
The population of Darfur is presently, as the UN puts it, suffering from "the world's worst humanitarian crisis." It is well documented that the Khartoum government bares much of the responsibility for this suffering, which the UN calls "ethnic cleansing" and the US called "genocide". It is however also well documented that the US through its closest African allies, helped train the SLA and JEM Darfuri rebels that initiated Khartoum's violent reaction. (source: Afrol News)
[Just something that crossed my mind: Remember the Taliban used to be backed by the US (through the Pakistani Secret Service) in their fight against the Mujaheddin and Russian influences... That one ran out of hand also, did it not?]
According to the "European Coalition on Oil in Sudan", here is a list of the companies who have oil interests in Sudan. Or in a map format. Quite a few of non-Chinese (European, North-American) companies have interests also!
Still, China is fast emerging as one of the world’s biggest, most secretive and irresponsible arms exporters, according to a report issued by Amnesty International.
4. So.. What is the conclusion?
So, what should we conclude? The US has Iraq, China has its Darfur for main oil supplies and everyone should be happy? Or should the conclusion be that if we would use more alternative energy sources, the world would be a better place, not only for the environment, but also for the refugees, terrorism and civil unrest? One thing is for sure: the situation in Darfur is "NOT stable and natural" as the Chinese and Sudanese media reported today... Unless if we all accept an ongoing genocide is "stable", because it has been ongoing since so long, and "natural" as... well... as it is in Africa of course... That's where people kill each other naturally, no?
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A more recent video by BBC reporter Jonah Fisher:
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