Would more people likely be killed in a humanitarian war (plus starvation and everything that usually follows) and counter insurgency than what will likely be killed in the current slaughter?

Are the chances for a stable democracy good or is it more likely to turn into an uncontrolable mess like Iraq and argueably Afghanistan?

Is there a third option to stop the massacre?

Would a REAL democracy result and not an IMF/World Bank imperialist take over?

Do economic sanctions ever work?

Do Human Rights groups advocate intervention?

He says that since the 1st world war the multilateral initiatives to ensure world peace withing the United States have been systematically sabotaged by the right wing imperialist tendancies.

What he recommends is a United Nations army that is specifically tasked to protect people from either foreign aggression or things like ethnic cleansing. For example, the authors point out that the US bombings of Serbia did not achieve peace but actually accelerated the process. The only way you will be able to stop the bloodshed is to send in troops to protect the innocent.

Sanctions don't work because they do not get at the dictators or power structures that are creating the problems. UN police need to go in and take out or arrest those who are contributing to crimes against humanity. More importantly I think that nation states need to meet certain international standards of conduct as a condition of having their sovereignity respected.

In Sudan the bench mark of democracy is not being met:

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Elections run by the government in the north have been characterized by a web of repressive legislation and security apparatuses preventing freedom for opposition parties to campaign, assemble, associate, and speak, and by election fraud; the SPLM/A has never conducted elections nor did its leadership hold elected political office prior to the war.

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- Human Rights Watch

here

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The Sudanese government also opposes inclusion of the western conflict in the IGAD peace talks, and has backed out of peace talks sponsored by Chad, which houses some 70,000 Darfur refugees. Many civilians have been killed in attacks in Darfur, mostly by the militias, and hundreds of villages reportedly burned down by these militias. The government continues to treat the non-Arab groups targeted by the militias as "bandits" and use summary trials and death sentences to punish them.

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These militias are state supported. The reason they are doing this is also quite clear.

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The Sudanese government waged a four-year scorched-earth campaign in the oilfields located in the south to displace the inhabitants, seeking to provide its version of "security" for foreign oil companies to operate in lands claimed by the rebels. On a bright note, the international human rights campaign to encourage corporate responsibility among the western foreign oil companies operating in Sudan succeeded in discouraging new western investors in Sudan's oil business, and resulted in the withdrawal of two western oil companies, and the reduction in operations of a third.

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But the fallacy here is that these oil fields are still owned by corporations seeking to protect their interests. So how is this an improvement? It seems to me more like an abdication of reponsibility. If they just stopped buying the oil or mining it until Human Righst conditions were improved then that would be an ethical decision - but that isn't what corporations do.

The UN is proposing and oil embargo against Sudan in return for improved action on Civil Rights.

Unless they are also willing to back it up with peace keeping forces thsi could make things worse.

American involvement is as usual duplicitous and questionable. On the one hand Human Rights observers were initially largely sponsored by the US backed Civilian Protection Monitoring Team. But this authority seems to be looking the other way on some crucial issues.

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Since the Sudanese government's offensive in the oilfields of Western Upper Nile/Unity State in January-February 2003, the ceasefire agreement between the government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army has held, due to the fact-finding intervention of the U.S.-run newly created Civilian Protection Monitoring Team (CPMT) and the convenor of the peace talks, the InterGovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). Fighting between the SPLA and southern militias, however, continues in Western Upper Nile/Unity State as well as in other parts of Upper Nile where the Nuer ethnic group (the mainstay of these militias) mostly live. The fighting has resulted in civilians killed and injured, and deprived of humanitarian assistance, although these conflicts are not reported to the CPMT by either the government (which backs the militias) or the SPLM/A. Little attention has been paid to the humanitarian concerns in this area by the international community.

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McNamara's book stresses the need to change the priorities of world governance away from the bullshit items that fall under the grand sounding words of "freedom and democracy" and redirect them toward the reduction of killing, murder and mayhem.

Indeed Human Rights watch also supports this notion.

Darfur

[ 19 September 2004: Message edited by: DonnyBGood ]

[ 19 September 2004: Message edited by: DonnyBGood ]

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The Wilson book sounds interesting; indeed, I sometimes wonder whether Wilson isn't the intellectual fahter of ethnic cleansing, with his stress on the right of each ethnic group to its own state.

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Wilson was an idealist who fought against draconian reprisals against Germany after WW1. He failed. He campaigned for article 15 in the League of Nations which would haved sanctioned multilateral intervention against any aggressor anywhere. He failed and the US congress failed to approve of US participation in the League.

But I would draw the opposite conclusion from your premise. "Ethnic" communities are really an invention of the hegemony. To an alien race of conquerors the planet earth would be just one "ethnic community".

The McNamara book calls for "strategic empathy" and is critical of Wilson's failure to understand the age old hatreds and rivalries that held sway after the war.

Little is said today of the revvolution that occured in Germany under the Kaiser by the German people looking for democracy and an end to war. A recent film (seen on TVO by me)about the era points out that although Germany was a dictatorship with no democratic voice, at the end of the war the newly elected democratic government was forced to sign a treaty that made the german people responsible for the war.

McNamara points out that the US may be doing the same thing to Russia and China in the sense that it is assuming that its uncontested miltary superiority allows them to be unconcerned with diplomacy.

Sudan needs the kind of strategic empathy that would cause the US backed CPMT to look south as well as north, to look to people as well as oil.

The UN is without the moral authority to take action elsewhere while Israel occupies Palestine.

If the US is serious about the UN it would seek a way to get Israel out of Palestine.

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The absence of anti-war scepticism about the prospect of sending troops into Sudan is especially odd in view of the fact that Darfur has oil. For two years, campaigners have chanted that there should be "no blood for oil" in Iraq, yet they seem not to have noticed that there are
huge untapped reserves in both southern Sudan and southern Darfur. As oil pipelines continue to be blown up in Iraq, the west not only has a
clear motive for establishing control over alternative sources of energy, it has also officially adopted the policy that our armies should be used to do precisely this. Oddly enough, the oil concession in southern Darfur is
currently in the hands of the China National Petroleum Company. China is Sudan's biggest foreign investor ...

... And we should treat with scepticism the claims made for the numbers of deaths - 30,000 or 50,000 are the figures being bandied about - when we know that similar statistics proved very wrong in Kosovo and Iraq. The Sudanese government says that the death toll in Darfur, since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, is not greater than 1,200 on all sides. And why is such attention devoted to Sudan when, in neighbouring Congo, the death rate
from the war there is estimated to be some 2 or 3 million, a tragedy equalled only by the silence with which it is treated in our media?

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It is a valid argument. They have lied, they continued to lie and they are still lying. They are incapable of anything but lies. Should we intervene in Sudan? I would say only if independent NGO's like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch agree.

[ 20 September 2004: Message edited by: WingNut ]

I find the idea of a benevolent occupation of the Sudan tricky, and not simply for logistical reasons. Can we be sure that the information we are being fed about the Sudan is true? I, for one, do believe the worse about the sectarian violence there, if only because I was reading about it long before the U.S. took any interest (publically) in the region. Do occupations actually work to end (or at least deter) civil wars? Cyprus strikes me as possibly the only example of an occupation (or at least separation) that worked to prevent sectarian violence and possibly genocide. The UN has to ask itself what went right in Cyprus, and compare to the current debacle in Iraq. Plan ahead and decide what deterrant (military or otherwise) will force the two sides in the Sudan to reach a political compromise to their conflict, instead of just trying to kill more people on the other side.

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The clearest way to a 'legitimate' occupation of the Sudan is through the UN security council.

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Why is Sudan any more beholden to the resolutions and laws of such an irrelevant institution as is the United States, Israel, or any other nation?

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I am conflicted on this issue too. But I know enough not to trust the lying liars who seemingly only recently discovered the carnage in Sudan. About the same time they realized oil form Iraq will noty flow as freely as they hoped.

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by Wingnut who has been around for three years and over 6,700 posts!

Here is the article's main thrust:

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We must remember that it's not only the US government that seeks to intervene. Opposition to the US-led war on Iraq helped keep the federal Liberal government at a distance from unilateral US aggression. However, the Liberals have few scruples when the UN or NATO seal of approval is added. Canadian troops continue to be part of NATO's imperialist operation in Afghanistan. The Canadian government was part and parcel of the game that got rid of Haitian President Aristide.

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There seems to be confusion here. A unilateral invasion by the US is almost a certainty where there is an absence of UN involvement.

There are some good reasons for sending in UN forces if the killings are less than are being reported. That is, the UN will have a greater chance to succeed. A UN success is a roadblock to US imperialism. The US is looking to further demonstrate the essential ineffectiveness of the UN in order to make unilateral action more attractive. So their are political advantages for the cause of a meaningful world government by acting now.

The annoying thing about morality is that it is often caught in the vice of this kind of dilema.

The United nations has to rise above US double dealing and do the right thing to reduce the killing.

What other option is available?

Shall we all join an expeditionary force to protect the villagers from the oil-industry funded militias? I doubt we would be effective.

UN police strategically located and properly equipped might suceed. An arms embargo and sanctions against Sudanese oil revenues might also suceed. Persuasive arguments made with the Chinese corporations might also convince them to help reduce the violence.

And of course encouraging some sort of alternative to World bank economic contraints might also be needed.

[ 20 September 2004: Message edited by: DonnyBGood ]

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by Wingnut who has been around for three years and over 6,700 posts!

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I have noticed that we get comfortable with left wing political "correctness". We are unwilling to take political risks. People are against Sudanese intervention for many reasons that are valid (but IMHO not determinative). One of the subtexts is of course the Bush rationale for the Iraqi invasion. Since the 91 Gulf war America has been trying to win the public's support for "good wars". The formality of getting UN approval is being trashed in favour of "results". Now we know that the UN has failed on missions in Rawanda and opposed the Kosovo bombing but was ineffective in stopping the genocide there.

So my point is that by opposing intervention you actually support the Bush argument that he must always urge the US to do these things on their own.

Being a great supporter and contributor to Rabble you would not want to do this I would think. I am suggesting that 6700 posts may have given you a "mindset" that inadvertantly supports the Bush agenda - ie passivism.

I guess I have been around in the world long enough to know that when the USA begins speaking of intervention, something else is afoot and it is never humanitarian.

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Now we know that the UN has failed on missions in Rawanda and opposed the Kosovo bombing but was ineffective in stopping the genocide there.

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What genocide in Kosovo? The ICTY prosecutor has stated that they do not think that they can pin genocide charge on their marquee client Solbodan Milosevic, and the court has been unable to turn up the mass graves reported to be waiting for UN inspectors.

My last information is that rather than 100,000, or even 10,000 dead the Kosovo investigation has turned up just over 2000 bodies, and some of those are very likely to be combat fatalities.

Despite Tales, the War in Kosovo Was Savage, but Wasn't Genocide -- Daniel Pearl writing for the Wall Street Journal

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But other allegations -- indiscriminate mass murder, rape camps, crematoriums, mutilation of the dead -- haven't been borne out in the six months since NATO troops entered Kosovo. Ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility. Now, a different picture is emerging.

Selective Terror

"Rwanda was a true genocide. Kosovo was ethnic cleansing light," says Emilio Perez Pujol, a Spanish pathologist who exhumed bodies after both conflicts. In his sector of western Kosovo, he says, the United Nations told him to expect as many as 2,000 victims. His team found 187 corpses, none of which showed evidence to confirm local accounts of mutilations.

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Fundamentaly the ongoing war, famine, plague and attack upon indiginous persons is worse in Colombia. You can find proven and long-sustained Human Rights abuse on the level of the Sudan all over the world, yet for some reason the motive force to do something about it comes about when their are primary resources of interest to the US involved.

[ 21 September 2004: Message edited by: Cueball ]

As earlier posts have noted, the fact that bad things are happening in Sudan is hardly news. This current enthusiasm for the 'genocide' going down there smells suspiciously like a fad, with scurrilous motivations lying in the shadows on the part of the western agencies involved.

Yes, by God, make changes there, clean it up, fix it up, haul the buggers up by the bootstraps - I think the shabby central government would benefit from a good squeeze to clean up its racist colonialism in the west of that vast nation - but let's not fool ourselves this is some 'pure' 'humanitarian' undertaking. The readiness, the floating-in-the-background preparedness to resort to armed intervention (utter fucking mindlessness)is more to do with local western political enthusiasms than any brass tacks analysis of events on the ground there.

Poor fucking Sudan. This current dabbling on the part of western powers, displaying for the first time in decades a passing interest in the welfare of its citizens - like some criminally neglectful parent - is repulsive, self-serving shite, and I don't trust their commitment an inch. Pure political trendiness, they'll be left high and dry like the Afghans, mark my words, if the thing develops beyond the current hot air phase.

I also see in Powell's initiative a , ahem, deeply superficial 'bait and switch' tactic: to get our minds off the Iraq disaster, hey, look, we got some real Islamic fundamentalist badasses over here! Only thing is, they bin there for decades, arsehole, and nobody saw fit to comment then.

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One should ask the naive question: why should the US not be a global policeman? The post-Cold War situation called for a global power to fill the void. The problem, however, is not that the US is a new global empire, but that it isn't one, though it pretends to be. In fact, the US continues to act as a nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its own interests. The watchword of recent US politics is a weird reversal of the well-known ecologists' motto: act global, think local. This contradiction is amply illustrated by the twin pressures the US was exerting on Serbia last year: it demanded that the government in Belgrade hand over suspected war criminals to the Hague tribunal (the logic of the global empire demands a trans-state global judicial institution) while at the same time urging it to sign a bilateral treaty with the US obliging it not to deliver to the International Criminal Court any US citizen suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity. No wonder the Serb reaction was one of perplexed fury. Apropos the Hague tribunal, Garton Ash wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that 'No Führer or Duce, no Pinochet, no Idi Amin and no Pol Pot should any longer be allowed to feel safe behind the palace gates of sovereignty from the intervention of people's justice.' One should take note of the names missing from this list.

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[ 23 September 2004: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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What genocide in Kosovo? The ICTY prosecutor has stated that they do not think that they can pin genocide charge on their marquee client Solbodan Milosevic, and the court has been unable to turn up the mass graves reported to be waiting for UN inspectors.

My last information is that rather than 100,000, or even 10,000 dead the Kosovo investigation has turned up just over 2000 bodies, and some

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But I think this is not supporting your argument against intervention. If the UN new that there was limited carnage would they not have been more likely to send in a peace keeping force? The fact that they didn't or couldn't agree resulted in the Nato bombing that as it turns outr was completely useless and "war criminalish" itself.

It is not even clear that the US backed a UN intervention proposal for Kosovo (did they?), instead they put out the message that the UN was inflexible, stodgy and unwilling to act, and this then justified the US tool of choice: NATO.

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The UN (in its resolution 1199), the West European powers and the Russians sought, during 1998, to bring about a cease fire and a negotiated solution in Kosovo, granting autonomy to the Albanians within Serbia. The Serbian government, from March 1998 declared its support for this, and there was support for this approach, as an interim solution, from the Rugova shadow government in Pristina. Only two major actors opposed this: Madeleine Albright and the KLA. Albright and the whole Clinton administration gave massive political support to the KLA, undermining the line of the other members of the Contact Group and the line of UN resolution 1199.

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The Twilight of the European Project

We saw the same routine with Iraq. The US forcing an unworkable timetable on the UN and then claiming that the UN was moribund, and that this neccesitated US direct intervention to avert immediate danger, in the case of Iraq; WMD, in the case of Serbia; Genocide.

[ 27 September 2004: Message edited by: Cueball ]

Bush is reported to have critcized the UN as ineffective in a speech citing the Rawanda genocide as the prime example. His own aides point out the problem that the US provided the main opposition to involvement in Rawanda by the UN, effectively vetoing any action to stay the genocide. Bush himself is on the record as having said at the time that intervention would note serve the "national interest".

This guy is a robot - the entire US political class are morons and criminally insane - Bush is not an anomally.

[ 27 September 2004: Message edited by: DonnyBGood ]

[ 28 September 2004: Message edited by: DonnyBGood ]

If hostilities are eased maybe some refugees could come back and reclaim their land. Naive perhaps, but what other solution is there, organise and arm the local villagers and hope for the best, or just let the ethnic cleansing continue while we talk?

One root problem I've heard (other than a brutal fundamentalist government) is desertification, which has broken down the mutual relationship between nomadic herders and farmers. I wonder if some of these traditional relationships could be reestablished over time under UN auspices, or whether the situation's gone too far(?) If they can't, then the problem is more knotty than anyone is letting on.

[ 27 September 2004: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]

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This guy is a robot - the entire US political class are morons and criminally insane - Bush is not an anomally.

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[ 27 September 2004: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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Isn't that a little extreme?

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This guy is a robot - the entire US political class are morons and criminally insane - Bush is not an anomally.

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[ 03 October 2004: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]

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Yes, well all the bureacracies in hell are staffed by human rights activists.

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Its a pun on the Lenin line you used. Yes, well all the bureacracies in hell are staffed by human rights activists (with good intention).

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Originally posted by CMOT Dibbler:
Why did you put no fly zone in quotes? Didn't it work?

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Oh, it worked at keeping the Iraqi airforce away from the Kurds but didn't stop the USAF from softening up Iraqi air defences and radar. Am trying to control my overuse of "irony" quotes, but figured I could get away with it here.

[ 09 October 2004: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]

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Originally posted by Cueball:
Its a pun on the Lenin line you used. Yes, well all the bureacracies in hell are staffed by human rights activists (with good intention).

I am making my usual cynical assessment of how the information developed (with all the best intentions) by human rights activists is manipulated and used to justify further human rights abuse.

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