Alright. I'm new to this thing, so I think that instead of doing the usual awkward first entry, I'll just jump into a little something that I've been thinking about. That sounds like a good idea. Here goes:
Who knows what Darfur is? Ever heard of it? Think for a minute...Its a region in Africa. Ever heard of the Rwanda genocide...seen the movie Hotel Rwanda? Let me tell you about Darfur..
For the past two and a half years the Arab-dominated government of Sudan has teamed up with sword-wielding marauders on horses and camels (these are called the Janjaweed) to butcher, rape, and murder non-Arabs living in Darfur. Basically I'll give a name to this: GENOCIDE. Apparently our world has not learned from Hitler..or the Rwanda genocide. The Darfur genocide is expected to have more deaths than the Rwanda genocide...think about that one for those of you who saw the movie. By this month alone, there are more than two-hundred thousand people that have been reported as dead, and TWO, count that, TWO million are unaccounted for. The U.N. is not doing much about this because they say that they are currently struggling to manage 16 other peacekeeping operations around the world and wish to, and i quote, "avoid handling yet another doomed mission." Wow...lets give a clap to the U.N. who is accomplishing so much. Any attempt by the African government to fight the Janjaweed has resulted in the deaths of the officers. They simply cannot be controlled by the African government. So will this ever end? Does this shock anyone? Why hasn't there been hardly any news coverage on this subject? Its been proven that ABC News had a total of 18 minutes of the Darfur genocide in its nightly newscasts all last year and that turns out be a credit to Peter Jennings. 18 minutes in an entire year. NBC had only 5 minutes of coverage all last year, and CBS only 3 minutes except for a minute of coverage in 60 minutes for every 100,000 deaths. (Let me put this in perspective...Martha Stewart received 130 minutes of coverage by THREE networks). In more than two years into the genocide, NBC has still not bothered to send one of its own correspondents into Darfur for independent reporting. However..if anyone ever cared to look (i admit i never did) then there has been serious reporting on Darfur in The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times and some other papers. This genocide has a total of deaths that could reach more than one million by the end of the year, which would make it top the number of deaths in Rwanda.
Just something to think about...
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I'm glad to see a post about Darfur.
You might really like a book called "Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda" by Roméo Dallaire. I just finished it last week, and it was earth-shattering. Prior to reading that I saw Hotel Rwanda last year and was completely in shock.
I think UN humanitarian missions, in an effort to not repeat the horrors of Rwanda, worked very hard to bring Darfur to the attention of the world. It's been in the news recently that Bush and other Senators have actually been pushing the UN very hard for a full-fledged peacekeeping mission to Darfur. However, I don't think what is happening in Darfur can be compared to what happened in Rwanda - in that I'm not really sure that it's genocide (see this article: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-clough14may14,1,1899740.story?coll=la-news-comment).