From South Kordofan:A Desperate Cry to "Mobilize the World"

It should come as no surprise that Sudan's Khartoum regime, under President Bashir, has resorted to brazen violence, including the murder of civilians, as the July 9 date approaches for the separation of South Sudan from the North as an independent nation. The situation is particularly dire in the disputed oil-rich border regions of Abyei and South Kordofan. Earlier this week, an email was sent out from a South Sudanese humanitarian worker who, along with some 26 other civilians, is under siege by North Sudanese forces. The letter, which was published in the New York Times, can be read here.

For more information about how you can help alleviate the suffering of the Sudanese people, check out the Enough Project. And above all, pray for the people of Sudan.

Botswana Shows Admirable Strength

Giving credit where credit is due, the government of Botswana, one of the continents most stable and successful democracies, should be saluted for stepping up and openly challenging the legitimacy of Robert Mugabe's continued rule in Zimbabwe. Botswana's delegates to the recent AU summit refused to recognize Mugabe as president of Zimbabwe following last week's election in which he was the only candidate, the opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai having withdrawn out of fear for his and his supporters physical safety. Some other African states, such as Tanzania and Liberia, have strongly criticized Mugabe following the election, but others, most notably South Africa under President Thabo Mbeki, have made excuses for Mugabe while refusing to take any measures to stabilize Zimbabwe and provide respite for its people.

Botswana has raised the possibilty of military conflict in order to force some stability, a measure not entirely uncalled for considering the mryiad of Zimbabwean refugees that continue to pour into the neighboring country. If violence results, it must be seen as directly the result of Mugabe's despotic rule and consequent ruination of Zimbabwe, causing a mounting crisis to the entire region that many of the most significant power players have miserably failed to address.

Will Mr. Mbeki Please Stand Up?

While not denying the complex problem of neo-colonialism, it is hard for a Westerner who truly hates to see injustice anywhere to believe that Robert Mugabe, or any of the host of African dictators of the past half-century, have anything but their own best interest in mind. When opposition activists are killed by the scores, beaten and harrassed by the tens of thousands, and people forced to flee the country by the hundreds of thousands as a result of disastrous economic policies on the part of the ZANU-PF (Mugabe's 'redistribution' of land to his own cronies, NOT to the people of Zimbabwe), it is clear that Mugabe is no longer a liberator. He is a corrupt and unprincipled despot who will stop at nothing to hold onto power. I do not believe that the people of Zimbabwe are so ignorant as to believe Mugabe's broken-record rationale of blaming every problem on the West. It is Mugabe, first and foremost who must take the blame, and the voting last spring proved that this is the view of most Zimbabweans, even in the face of violent intimidation. For this, I praise the brave people of Zimbabwe. Now if only some African leaders, South Africa's Thabo Mbeki in particular, would have the courage and intelligence to make a similar stand (as, it should be noted, Mr. Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently have) and put an end to this inhumane madness, perhaps the West would not feel compelled to 'interfere'.

Have We Learned Yet?

The recent violence in Kenya is disturbing, even terrifying. A quick summary: following disputed elections on 27 December, 2007, in which incumbent president Mwai Kibaki claimed victory, unrest broke out among opposition supporters of candidate Raila Odinga, amid charges of fraud and election stealing. Not so noteworthy, perhaps, especially for Africa. Here is what makes it so frightening: Kibaki is a Kikuyu, the majority tribe in a country comprised of about 40 ethnic tribes; Odinga is a Luo, the second or third largest tribe; and the violence (which has claimed around 500 lives already, and displaced another 250,000) is quite openly being drawn along ethnic lines.



Last week, 30 Kikuyu, many of them women and children, were burned to death in a church into which they had fled for refuge. There have been retaliations on the part of the Kikuyu. Sound familiar? It does to anyone who remembers a genocide that took place in another African country called Rwanda not fifteen years ago. In that tragedy, 800,000 people were killed before the international community decided to take real measures to stop the slaughter.



Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who has called for a UN criminal investigation into the church killing, urges the world to not allow the disputed election to take precedence over the lives of innocent civilians. No political reasoning, by anyone in either party, justifies genocide. He writes,

" What is disturbing is that this instance seems to have been part of a coordinated programme with similar acts occurring in several other places at about the same time against ordinary members of the same community. Ordinary people do not wake up one morning and suddenly decide to kill their neighbours. Ethnic cleansing is often instigated by the political elite of one community against another community. It is premeditated - often an order from political warlords."



This situation must not be allowed to deteriorate any further. The world community has made overtures of diplomacy to both Kibaki and Odinga, and the U.S. has appointed a high-level diplomat to attempt a brokerage of peace. This is well and good, but thus far, the situation has not improved. Let us not forget that we had a token UN force in Rwanda during the crisis there, and it accomplished next to nothing. A percieved effort, even an honest effort, on the part of the U.S. and the international community is not good enough. If the diplomatic efforts do not bear fruit, it is unacceptable for us to call over our shoulder, 'We tried,' as we walk away, leaving thousands at the mercy of genocide-inspiring politicians and their ready followers. This is no excuse; there can be no excuses.

Let us not forget.

Sudanese Government Intelligence

There is a great concern among those parties interested in bringing help and aid to the suffering people of Darfur that the response of the U.S. may be compromised by the fact that Khartoum is now an "ally" in the global war on terror. As incredible as this assertion may sound when one considers the Sudanese government's past role as a state sponsor of terrorism and Islamic radicalism (they harbored Osama bin Laden for some time), as well as the atrocities perpetrated time and again against its own people, the fact is that when President Bush declared that states must be "either for us, or against us" Khartoum shrewdly decided that it could not afford to count the U.S. as a public enemy in the war on terror.

Sadly, it seems that the War on Terror may, in this regard, bear resemblance to one of the most regrettable aspects of the Cold War: the support (or at least tolerance) of regimes with horrendous human rights records by the U.S. goverment, simply because they offer some strategic interest or potential. It makes me shake my head in despair when I learn of my governments' support for regime's such as Mobutu's in Zaire, a "friendly tyrant" who lived in the most oppulent luxury imaginable while his country was slowly strangled by his megalomaniacal rule. All the while, Mobutu recieved billions in U.S. aid for one sole reason - he could be counted on to oppose Soviet influence.

Today, I see history repeating itself. Sudan has been called the worst dictatorship currently in the world by independent study groups. General Bashir has stated openly since his takeover of power of his intentions to "cleanse" Sudan, and to assure the ascendency of radical Islam. For years, Khartoum waged war against the south, bombing hospitals and schools, raping women, and killing civilians en masse. Today, the litany of horrors continues in Darfur, and while the U.S. has, of course, not supported the genocide directly, it has, by its unwillingness to take action against Khartoum, allowed the killing to continue. This is not acceptable.

Such lack of initiative is unacceptable on moral grounds. Yet even beyond this, if one examines the political logic behind tacit support for Khartoum, the current position must be viewed as untenable. What reliable anti-terrorism intelligence can we possibly hope to gain from a government which calculates the death toll in Darfur to be 9,000, while the rest of the world calculates the loss of life to have topped 200,000? Is any intelligence which such a self-serving, immoral, and duplicitous regime could offer us worth the cost of such complicity, even if we somehow had reason to believe it was reliable?

Christians Targeted in Iraq

Pope Benedict XVI expressed concern last month over what may be considered a mass exodus of Christians from the Middle East, particularly Iraq. In that country, as the world is well aware, violence has been rampant and brutal; what is not so well known is the particularly harsh treatment that has fallen upon Christians in the region.

As in most Muslim countries, Christians in Iraq face constant pressure to convert to Islam. If they do not, they are often targeted for persecution, or, as in Iraq, given the choice of leaving the country or facing death. If they are overly open about their faith or seek to convert a Muslim, they may very likely be killed for “dishonoring the Prophet.” In Iraq, in June, a Catholic priest was kidnapped and later released, while another priest was killed in Mosul. Father Bernardo Cevelera, of AsiaNews, states, “There is a continuing pressure to close Christians in the Middle East in a kind of ghetto.” On July 16, Dutch parliamentarian Joel Voordewind made the claim that a number of Christians in Iraq have been crucified by militants.

Though all Christians are suffering the violence in Iraq, it is understandably most notable among the most numerous group of Christians, the Assyrians. The Assyrian Church is indeed in dire straits. According to the U.N., over half of the 1.5 million Christians living in Iraq before 2003 have fled the country, and many more have fled to quieter northern Iraq.

Cornering the Market

"It's our bodies, our choice." It seems inevitable that men who oppose abortion must hear this retort, or some equivalent argument. I have alway found it incredibly irksome, not to mention ill-founded.

Firstly, let us not forget that once a woman has conceived, she is not responsible for her body alone; whether she is amenable to the facts or not, they remain: there is now another body within her, dependent upon her.

Secondly, since when does a pregnancy concern the woman exclusively? It takes two to bring about that state, and one of the parties is a man. Is he to have no say in the future of a life that was brought into existence by his part as equally as the woman's? If one is still inclined to answer that the decision is the business of the woman exclusively, I must then insist, along the same lines of logic, that women desist in the protesting of war and armed conflict. Is this not the business of men, into which women have inappropriately inserted themselves this past half-century, upsetting the proper millinia-old spheres of gender?

"Ah, but it is the fathers, husbands, and sons of women who fight such wars," one may counter. "Women, being in fact so greatly involved in the business of war, bound by blood, concern, and love to those involved in its events directly, must be permitted to have due influence in these matters." I quite agree, and it is by this same logic that I claim the right of every father to have his voice heard when it comes to the health and future of his unborn son or daughter.