Tag Archives: sudan

africa continues to be myopic and ready for the picking

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So I keep reading stories about foreign governments like China, the Gulf States and South Korea that are planning on buying millions of acres of Africa’s arable land in order to provide food security for their citizens. From what I gather, most African governments are eager to sell 100 year leases in order to make a quick buck and then for 100 years condemn their countrymen and women to being near-slaves to foreigners in their own countries. How more stupid can our leaders get?

As a continent, Africa is the most food insecure place on the planet. Millions depend on food aid, even in supposedly more developed countries like Ghana, Kenya and Senegal. Some countries like Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, and nearly all of the Francophone Sahel have never known food security for decades. They have been permanent recipients of aid from the US and the World Food Program. It makes you wonder why it is not these governments making deals with their fellow African countries to guarantee the continent some food security.

Food production is what propelled human civilization. Mesopotamia, the Indus-Gangetic Valley, the Nile Valley, were all organised with an aim of improving food production so as to free up talent for other more meaningful human endeavors. Africa, nearly 12,000 years later, still cannot afford to feed its own people. It is not a question of land or water. The great lakes regions can feed the entire continent and still have a surplus. With the exception of the South West African countries and the Sahelian states, all of Sub-Saharan African countries ought to be food-secure. The fact that they are not is simply and squarely because of poor leadership.

And now these same inadequate leaders want to sell the land to foreigners. I am assuming that when foreign governments buy land they’ll treat it like they do with their embassies – provide their own security and run the show by their own rules. I wonder how different this will be from an outright recolonization of the African continent by more developed and better run countries.

We are still in the woods. And we are screwed for the foreseeable future. Like it is not even funny anymore. Our Mugabes, Obiangs and Zenawis continue to fail us big time. How hard can it be to run a country? Like seriously.

al-Bashir accused of war crimes and genocide in Darfur

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At last there is some international organisation with some spine. Although the practicality of this accusation is doubtful – nobody even dreams that al-Bashir, the genocidal president of Northern Sudan will ever appear in court for his crimes in Darfur and beyond – the symbolism behind it is powerful. It is powerful because it says it like it is. President al-Bashir’s mission in Darfur is genocidal and utterly criminal. Yes, he is is fighting rebels intent on dislodging him from power (and as I have stated before I am no sympathizer of rebel movements) but the way he is doing it in Darfur is not the right way.

The prosecutor of the international criminal court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, brought the case against al-Bashir on account of the more than 300,000 deaths in Darfur over the last five years.

Again, al-Bashir may never see the inside of a cell in the Hague but it is a triumph for justice, or more appropriately, the quest for justice. Almost half a million have died and millions displaced while the international community ‘dillies and dallies’ about Sudan’s sovereignty. A nation forfeits its sovereignty the moment it starts butchering its own people. Period.

Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir and his kind throughout Africa and the world should be made aware of the fact that there are people out there who are dedicated to bringing them to justice. As usual, I am disappointed by the AU’s reaction to all this. I am kind of curious as to how the more outspoken (radical) presidents on the continent – Senegal’s Wade, Botswana’s Khama and Rwanda’s Kagame – will react to this. I hope that they will continue in their commitment to telling it like it is, unlike their more defensive counterparts.

On a related note. I wish more Darfuri rebels and Janjaweed militia alike could also be brought to book because all three parties (the JEM rebels, janjaweed and the government of Northern Sudan) are causing untold suffering to innocent civilians in this war.

time to rethink the idea behind sovereignty

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In the book The Bottom Billion, the author Paul Collier talks about the growing international apathy at the suffering of millions of people around the world. This, he says, has been reinforced by a general dislike of interventionist measures especially after the Somalia and Iraq fiascoes. Somalia made the US be wary of military interventions even in dirt poor third world countries like Somalia that hasn’t had a functioning government since Siad Barre was deposed in the early nineties. Enough has been said about Iraq.

But are these two cases enough to make the international community completely abandon millions of people to be tormented and killed by their own governments? I am thinking about the horrible situations that are currently playing out in Burma, Chad, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and many other places where governments are killing their own citizens or letting them die for political or ideological reasons. This is unacceptable and should not be allowed to continue.

I echo Collier’s call that the international community set a precedence; that tyranny against civilians will not be tolerated anywhere on the globe. This is not a call for haphazard invasions all over the place. But there are extreme cases that should be addressed more forcefully. The genocide in Darfur should not be allowed to continue simply because Northern Sudan is a Muslim country with a potential for being jihadist. Thousands of people should be let to die in the jungles of the DRC simply in honor of that ungovernable country’s sovereignty. And does Mugabe really deserve to be sovereign in a country that he continues to drive deeper into hell? And what claim does the military junta in Burma have on sovereignty when they let tens of thousands die and hundreds of thousands without help even when the international community itches to help after a devastating cyclone hit the country?

All these extreme cases should be considered as exceptions. Somalia and Iraq should not stop the international community from ever acting again in an effort to save human lives. I am not calling for a neoconservative style democratization of the world, dictators can be tolerated, but only when they are not actively killing their own people or denying them food and other basic needs. Is this too much to ask of them?

Sovereignty should not be seen as an end in itself. Political leaders should know that the international community will only let them enjoy sovereignty when they act responsibly. I happen to believe that democratic government is the ideal but different places have different needs in different stages of their history. For instance young countries may not necessarily thrive as democracies, but this does not give their leaders a right to act like the Al-Bashirs and Than Shwes of this world.

time to do away with weak african governments

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Northern Sudan’s government just got its nose bloodied bad. And this by a bunch of rag tag rebels from the dusty deserts out West fighting with machine guns mounted on the back of pick up trucks. These rebels, previously confined to Darfur and other hot spots finally made an attempted march to the seat of power in Khartoum. Sudan’s skirmishes with its rebel movements brought memories of yet another African government that was nearly toppled by a bunch of bandits on pick up trucks – Chad. In Chad’s case France came to the rescue. Sudan seems to have taken care of the rebels using its own helicopter gunships and other weapons bought from the Chinese in exchange for oil.

As I have stated before, I have no sympathies for rebel movements, regardless of what their cause might be. It is in a large part because of these movements that most of Africa has remained underdeveloped because resources were shifted to fighting useless wars instead of focusing on the advancement of African people. Violent uprising will never solve any problem. Somalia, the DRC, Burundi and many others are testaments to this fact.

That said, I also think that certain African governments that are too weak to hold their own against rebels and other armed groups should be allowed to die a Darwinian death. When rebels drive for miles to the capital without being stopped by the existing government, you know there is a problem. Why did Khartoum wait for the rebels to reach Omdurman before doing anything?

Khartoum’s genocidal strongman ought to be embarrassed enough to realise that he cannot stop the insurgency in Darfur by killing the rebels and dropping bombs on innocent women and children. This week’s incident has proven that there cannot be a military solution to the rebel problem. The government of Sudan has been exposed as unable to hold its own against these rebels and therefore they have to negotiate with them and perhaps even meet some of the demands of the JEM led rebels.

stop your genocidal agenda, al-bashir

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The man behind the humanitarian catastrophe that is Darfur, one Omar Al-Bashir, is at it again, on another front. It has emerged that his government is backing the Arab Misseriya tribesmen against Southern Sudanese civilians in continuation of Al-Bashir’s genocidal agenda in Africa’s largest country.

The SPLM government of Southern Sudan said in a statement that its forces had killed about 70 armed Arab militias. In an editorial in the New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wrote about a contested town called Abyei that has been surrounded by armed Arab militias ready to attack. The status of the town is in question since both the North and Southern Sudan claim is as part of their autonomous territories. This latest incidence further confirms Al-Bashir’s commitment to using tribal militias as proxies for his continued refusal to honor the comprehensive peace agreement he signed with the late John Garang’ in 2005.

Just like in Darfur, Al-Bashir is using local tribal militias to kill, rape and maim innocent civilians that dare to protest against his autocratic rule that is biased against the South and other regions that are occupied by ethnic non-Arabs.

Al-Bashir’s policies toward the suffering masses in Darfur and elsewhere over the years confirm him to be a card-carrying latter day genocidal racist.

It is sad that the world continues to watch, with half hearted protests, as this murderous despot continues to kill and maim innocent women and children – the very people he is supposed to protect as president of Sudan.

This latest move by Al-Bashir will exert pressure on the delicate agreement that exists between North and Southern Sudan. Al-Bashir knows that consistent with the agreement, the South will definitely secede when they have a referendum in 2011. Before then he wants to gain control over as much potentially-oil-rich land as possible, even if it means killing innocent civilians. This is the case in Abyei and surrounding areas.

Al-Bashir is hiding behind Sudan’s “Islamic Country” status to keep the West at bay. So I think it is up to the rest of Africa to act. This guy needs to be stopped yesterday. If he doesn’t and the war escalates then I think the rest of Africa should consider putting together a joint force to keep him out of Darfur and Southern Sudan. This is the least we can do in honor of the millions that have died over the last three decades due to Northern Sudan’s racist arrogance. Africa owes this not only to the Darfuris and Southern Sudanese but also to itself.

of teddy bears and Bashir’s pardon

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So in the last few days there has been uproar in Europe over the ludicrous jailing of a British teacher in Sudan because she let her young students christen a teddy bear Mohamed ……. really Sudan, really? Luckily for the poor well-meaning lady the international attention that was generated by her arrest and the resultant embarrassment to the Sudanese top brass made the Bashir government decide to pardon her and have her taken back to the UK.

This got me thinking, it is apparent – at least after this incident – that Bashir cares about what people outside Northern Sudan (East of Darfur) and China think of him. Just like embarrassment was used to put some sense into his administration about this teddy bear incident may be the international community can embarrass him with different kinds of stories about Darfur. Stories with a human face.

A lot of the stories coming out of Darfur have mostly included blanket reports on atrocities and numbers of those dead and displaced but we have not yet had a well publicised story of a poor woman, named say Aisha, who may have been raped, had a village razed to the ground and then left to die by the Janjaweed but who mysteriously survived. May be after Bashir sees these human stories he might just be persuaded into accepting the fact that Darfur needs more attention than it is getting right now from Khartoum.

As the world continues to call him names and antagonise him, Bashir might be growing even thicker skin and plugging his ears. What he can’t ignore, it seems, is an assault on his pride and his basic human sensibilities.

I have focussed on Bashir but this could apply to all those involved in the atrocities in Darfur, including the men bearing the red flag from the East.