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The militiamen laid waste to the town — burning huts, pillaging shops, carrying off any loot they could find and shooting anyone who stood in their way,

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The attacks by the janjaweed, the fearsome Arab militias that came three weeks ago, accompanied by government bombers and followed by the Sudanese Army, were a return to the tactics that terrorized Darfur in the early, bloodiest stages of the conflict.

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Scorched-Earth Strategy Returns to Darfur

This ethnic based killing, and it reminds me of the genocide in Rawanda , the world doesn't care about dead africans. Yes there are peace keepers there but there were in Rawanda as well.

Africa’s Next Slaughter

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This dusty little town of rutted dirt streets is surrounded by janjaweed, Arab militias armed by the Sudanese government and paid to do its dirty work.

But this isn’t Darfur, where the janjaweed have played the central role in the genocide that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Rather, Abyei is on the edge of southern Sudan, in a region that is supposed to be at peace.

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the world doesn't care about dead africans

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- yes the people who order the killings and do the killing are not to blame in some people eyes of course,they view far away people as mindless dupes who act as though brainwashed by some otherwordly force used by powerful magicians.

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By the world I mean north america, south america, europe, asia, the middle east, the tropics,

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- yes the people who order the killings and do the killing are not to blame in some people eyes of course, they view far away people as mindless dupes who act as though brainwashed by some otherwordly force used by powerful magicians.

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That other nations, and corporations take advantage for there own interest is obvious

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all through human history it has been the case,

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of course some people limit their critisms to a select few of the countries they love to hate the most without acknowledging that the whole world is in on it in one way or another.

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No ones hands are clean.

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[ 02 March 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]

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Originally posted by Ibelongtonoone:
This ethnic based killing, and it reminds me of the genocide in Rawanda , the world doesn't care about dead africans. Yes there are peace keepers there but there were in Rawanda as well.

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Tell us, what is the singular ethnicity of the victims you refer to?

Maybe things aren't that simple.

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Given the claims of genocide in Darfur, it is incredibly important to understand what these groupings are and what they represent to the people who constitute them. Is there indeed mobilization along ethnic, religious, racial and/or tribal lines? If so, how did these groups form? How have context and circumstance contributed to their existence? In Darfur, exploration of these categories reveals a highly complex ethnic mosaic where identities overlap yet behavior is considered as though each group were discrete and separate....

In a place like Sudan, with its long history of internal migration, foreign conquest, connection to external markets and tribal interchange, the notion that any portion of the population is indigenous or pure is faulty. Indeed claims by the elite in Khartoum that they represent a pure Arabic stream are inaccurate. Even the relative isolation of Western and Southern Sudan until recent decades did not prevent considerable mixing by race, tribe, and religion....

Likewise, to note that approximately 50% of the people are African and 40 % are Arab obscures more than it clarifies. What do the terms African and Arab mean to those who use them?...

Sudan is a country with a complex racial mix. Everyone is black yet a cultural racism persists that is an artificial means by which the powerful retain power. Legitimate economic differences, such as those between herders and farmers in a drought plagued area, are subsumed into an artificial Arab/African dichotomy. The government did not construct these differences. History and nature did that. But the government is the one who promotes them, and uses them to mask its own incompetence and indifference. They were trained well by their predecessors in the Egyptian, Arab, Ottoman, and British world. Source

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[ 02 March 2008: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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Originally posted by RosaL:
But there seems to be some kind of presupposition that there are people "the world" does care about.

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Let's say Germany in 1939 had never invaded Poland or anywhere else instead within it's own border's the Nazi Party simply rounded up imprisoned and eventually killed all the jews,blacks,gypsies,socialists,gays,handicapped mentally and physically,lazy(read dreamers, artists,drunkards)the intellectually curious, you get my point.

According to most here, no other country should have interfered or tried to kill Hitler even. Maybe the regime would have fallen or maybe Europe would be totally different today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudan

(a ditty which is rather too unbiased IMHO but gives some idea of the recent Western artifice of this state, particularly in regards to "their" non-Muslim south and non-Arabic agrarian south-west)

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The world means just that, most everyone in the world, the elites in Rio de Janerio aren't marching in the streets to stop this war anymore than they aren't in London or Toronto.

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According to most here, no other country should have interfered or tried to kill Hitler even. Maybe the regime would have fallen or maybe Europe would be totally different today.

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Why is it when people are talking about weapons being sold to Saddam or any other country, they only mention the US or Great Britan maybe Israel and on a long shot maybe China, but what about Russia, Germany, France, and others who have supplied weapons and they also all have colonial histories along with the Spanish, Dutch and yes Canada although technically they were British.

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The US is the largest arms dealer on the planet including small arms sales to non-government actors that end up in whose hands?

The US has opposed and undermined each and every significant international effort to control and reduce arms sales.

You are like a cop busting and beating the addict while the pusher looks on with your approval.

[ 02 March 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

When i see the story about ethnic based killing, I think about the people being killed and those doing the killing not something that happened decades, centuries ago (not that colonization isn't wrong), or how my owning a tv is the cause of this violence.

Sorry if you don't like my aphorisms - but they are more concise - fill in the rest yr self.

There is a constant effort to shift focus from causes to effects and even further to effects indirect from the most obvious cause.

You want to focus on Darfur because you see blacks and Arabs killing blacks and Arabs quite apart from the usual whites killing blacks and Arabs. But you also don't want to view Darfur in the wider context of the reasons giving rise to the conflict which are environmental and can be linked to Western consumption and carbon emissions. And, of course, as always, where people die and where the West displays "care". there is also oil.

You can be angry with me if you want. But it is a simple fact that your privileged life, and mine, come at the cost of other people living in need, without even basic dignity, and subjected to relentless violence.

Look out your window as the large SUVs that are all consuming gross amounts of non-renewable fossil fuels without any productive purpose and view that in the context of the war in Iraq that has killed more and displaced more than Darfur and is being waged for no other reason than to ensure Westerners can continue wasting non-renewable resources. The very same resources that produce the emissions that change the climate that changes the rain patterns that leads to wars in Sudan and Chad and throughout Africa as water and arable land cede to deserts.

Yes, you are partly responsible, as am I, as is all of us. The difference is you want to blame the consequences for the cause and reject any personal responsibility as that might then entail making personal changes.

[ 03 March 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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America's militarized foreign policy on the African continent does not benefit Africans. The inauguration of AFRICOM, the US military headquarters for the African continent, was met with universal condemnation and scorn by ordinary Africans across the continent, and their governments. Africans don't want US arms, they don't want US intervention, and they don't want US bases....

America's foreign policy elite, its multinational corporations, the Pentagon and its constellation of military suppliers and mercenary contractors know what they want. They want the coltan, the oil, the gold, and the diamonds. They want to privatize every state and social resource, down to the water supplies. They want to tie African agriculture to genetically engineered American crop varieties, and collect royalties for the use of these “patented” plants. They want to prevent African nations from spending their own wealth from their own resources on health and education infrastructure, on food subsidies, on growing jobs and healthy internal economies. And they want to keep Africa a war-torn hell on earth, because it's good for business. If you're not a “failed state” yet, they'll make you one.

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