|
It is Darfur again and the
misery goes on
E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Ghanadot
October 4, 2007
Three days after the brutal
murder of African peacekeepers in Darfur, Archbishop Tutu, the
highly regarded man of conscience, led a council of elders on a
mission to Darfur.
With him was President Carter, the perpetual peacekeeper.
It is hard to fit President
Carter in any African leadership construct.
But, he was there. Perhaps, after this junket, he could
earn a Nobel Peace prize again, and then there would be peace in
Darfur like there has always been in Palestine since his last
award!
Indeed, we need a dulling of the
senses to believe that this hybrid council of elders is
necessary because our African villages, towns, cities,
parliaments, and the AU organization itself are empty of
competent elders, so President Carter can act as a substitute!
Still, with great respect to this
council of elders, the purpose of this Darfur trip remains a
question.
Has there not been enough talk
and fact-finding trips already? Peace
in Darfur is the goal.
But it is still the hell-hole which the Sudanese
government has created.
The Sudanese government has
allowed the hell-hole to exist since the beginning of this
century. Peace will not come to Darfur through talk alone.
Ten AU soldiers have been
reported murdered in the latest attack at Haskanita, Darfur.
Many are wounded and some are still missing.
The AU, as usual, is threatening
action, which everybody knows it will not take.
Instead of asking how it got itself hoodwinked into
providing a fighting force that is not sustainable without help
from outside nations, it is howling for peace through talk.
But to hear from President
Carter, peace is on the horizon.
He reported the following from President Omar Hassan
al-Bashir of Sudan.
"He (Bashir) promised us there
would be $300 million in all coming to the Darfur region in
compensation, $100m coming from the government, and $200m to be
a loan from the Chinese."
Permission for mirth should be
allowed at this point: The lives of the 400,000 plus African
Sudanese have been lost at Darfur so far, but here was Carter
and Bashir agreeing to a compensation package which would only
grant a paltry sum of $750 per head for each dead.
Even so, if one would think that
money is all that is needed to bring peace to Darfur. then why
not let President Bashir keep the entire sum, both borrowed and
promised, in exchange for the assurance that he would keep the
Arab Sudanese from incursions into the Darfur side, rather than
heap this insult on the heads of so many dead African Sudanese
with his paltry offer.
Again, Darfur is an ongoing
genocide. The UN, as usual, doesn’t seem to see it as genocide
in Africa. Right in the
middle of this conflict, it prefers to see it as a tribal one as
the latest report seems to suggest.
The 157 AU soldiers at the
Haskanita outpost were attacked by “a large force numbering up
to 1,000 well-equipped Darfuri rebels.”
Note, the Darfuri rebels, the
Sudanese Africans, are now the bad guys, not the Arab Janjaweed
in this so-called tribal war.
Of course, in the middle of a
dark desert night, optical illusions do happen. A Janjaweed
could be mistaken for a Darfuri rebel, especially when the
former is in disguise.
The optical illusion is what,
hopefully, the tour of the Council of Elders seeks to unravel.
But all may not be lost. It seems
Archbishop Tutu, the great freedom fighter, would have been
calling for war were it not for his cassock.
All one needs to do is to listen
to his language during this mission of the elders when he called
on world governments to speed up deployment of the 26,000 joint
UN-AU replacement force for peacekeeping in the Darfur region.
"I am making a call to people of
goodwill ... for goodness sake, tell your governments to get off
their butts," Tutu said.
St. Peter may not tolerate this
outburst, but for an Archbishop to use this language means his
spirit has been pushed beyond his human skin and cassock.
"It is unacceptable that the AU
mission is not better equipped. They couldn't even evacuate the
injured after the Haskanita attack because they don't have
military helicopters," Reuters reported the Archbishop as
saying.
The AU can get mad at the
Archbishop. Individual governments can stand up to Sudan. At
least South Africa can. So can Nigeria or the ECOWAS countries.
But their responses are muted.
Just listening to Mr. James
Kalilangwe, chairman of the AU Peace and Security Council
explain future AU action.
The AU, he said, was thinking
about “strengthening the camp defenses of the peacekeeping
force.” This is
enough to make your stomach turn.
A lot has been said about how
easy is it is to ridicule Africa. The $300 million promised for
peace by Bashir, if used to strengthen “camp defenses” will not
matter. Sadly, the defenses can also be blown to smithereens by
armaments of less value.
The power that lies in the hands
of the Council of Elders can only do one thing.
Allow this writer to think that, on that note, a lot can
be done for Darfur by banishing Sudan from the AU.
E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher
ww.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, October 4, 2007
Permission to publish: Please
feel free to publish or reproduce, with credits, unedited. If
posted on a website, email a copy of the web page to
publisher@ghanadot.com. Or don't publish at all.
|
