that mentioned on Meet the Press that the while the U.S. pours billions into Iraq, Somalia receives around 1-2 million dollars a year in foreign aid. You just can’t ignore other crisis in the world while hoping that they go away. :
Almost four years after conflict broke out in Darfur, calls are being made for greater efforts to resolve the predicament in this western region of Sudan.
During an event marking International Human Rights Day Dec. 8, outgoing United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan reiterated that the world can, and must intensify the drive to address violence in Darfur.
Renewed fighting has been taking place in the region over the past two months, and aid agencies warn that this is causing thousands of civilians to flee into mountainous areas where they are cut off from assistance. Sudan’s government has clashed with a coalition of rebels that failed to sign the Darfur Peace Agreement in May 2006 in the Nigerian capital, Abuja — the National Redemption Front.
Why does the world continue to ignore Darfur? The whole world has plenty of evidence of a genocide in Darfur, yet where are they? In Iraq. Talk about priorities. To put some of this in context, Osama bin Laden was LIVED and OPERATED in Somalia for years before 9/11.
I have participated in international medical trips in El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, and though I have never encountered any real danger - and I don’t count crossing an old, rackety bridge 200 feet above the ground, Indiana Jones style, as such - :
The United Nations says that international aid work is one of the world’s most hazardous professions, in which humanitarian workers are constantly threatened with — or victims of — kidnappings, harassment, detention and deadly violence.
A U.N. study, currently before the 192-member General Assembly, points out that hundreds of aid workers and U.N. humanitarian personnel continue to face risks in some of the world’s major trouble spots, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Israel and Haiti.
“By any measure,” says U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, “international aid work is a dangerous profession.”
By dangerous jobs I mean civilian jobs, not U.S. soldiers. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, a comparison of on-the-job death rates in the top 10 most hazardous civilian occupations would place aid workers at number five after loggers (92.4 per 100,000 workers), pilots (92.4), fishermen (86.4) and structural iron and steel workers (47.0). I would add “reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan” as well but I can’t find the statistics for that one yet.
“Security firmly in place, Clinton Fein’s latest exhibition, Torture, scheduled to open at Toomey Tourell Gallery in San Francisco on January 4, 2007, is a shocking and defiant exploration of America’s approach to torture under the Bush administration,” the press release states.
The exhibition consists of “a series of staged and digitally manipulated photographic images” which “recreate infamous torture scenes from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, transforming diffuse, muted and low-resolution images into large-scale, vivid, powerful and frightening reproductions.”
Artist Fein was born in South Africa, and according , he is “closely identified with his controversial web site, Annoy.com and his notable Supreme Court victory against Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States, challenging the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act in 1997, where Fein’s right to disseminate his art was upheld in a landmark victory for First Amendment rights.”
And just what types of pictures he plans on exhibiting? Here are two of them:
And then you wonder why I think George W. Bush is a war criminal.
First, as you now know, the long effort by King Leopold II of Belgium to bring Congo under his control was driven by his avid quest for a commodity central to industry and transportation: rubber. Does that remind you of anything?
What’s more, the king justified his grab for Congo’s natural resources with much talk about bringing philanthropy and Christianity to darkest Africa. Now what did that remind you of?
Leopold cleared at least $1.1 billion in today’s dollars during the 23 years he controlled Congo, and his businessmen friends made additional huge sums. Much of the money flowed into companies with special royal concession rights to exploit the rain forest. Final question, for extra credit: Do those companies remind you of anything? If you mentioned Halliburton or DynCorp, you’re right again.
As a reader of history, you must have been interested, I’m sure, in something else in the Congo story: the case of another world leader facing his own Abu Ghraib scandal.
Of course, some backstory is needed for all of this. is the author of among other books, of , that explores the exploitation of the Congo Free State by Leopold II of Belgium. Basically King Leopold justified his grab of Congo’s natural resources - notably rubber - with talks of bringing Christianity & philanthropy to Africa.
Then why Hochschild’s op-ed? Because George W. Bush supposedly read his book. So Mr. Hochschild was very pleased that Dubya read his book, and he not only compares Dubya with King Leopold, but has a couple of suggestions for Bush as well:
For your next assignment, Mr. President, how about a different sort of reading? Ask Laura to stuff your Christmas stocking with books about people who’ve had the courage to change their minds. One former tenant of the house you live in, Lyndon B. Johnson, entered politics as a traditional segregationist but ended up doing more for civil rights than any American president of his century. Another, Dwight D. Eisenhower, spent half his life in the U.S. military but gave us (a little late) an eloquent warning about the military-industrial complex.
Another ex-military man, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler of the U.S. Marine Corps, won the Medal of Honor twice, but then ended up denouncing the oil companies and agribusiness corporations he realized that he had been fighting for in U.S. interventions in Central America.
You think Bush is going to listen to Hochschild? Of course not - the man barely listens to what the American people say of him.
That it’s taboo to talk about it in the U.S. Or that you will get pounded by the U.S. media and the American Israel Lobby for even daring to bring it up. Even if you are a former president of the U.S. and winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, a.k.a. Jimmy Carter. :
In fact, if there is a failing in Carter’s stance, it is that he is too kind to the Israelis, bending over backward to assert that he is only writing about the occupied territories. Israel itself, he says, is a democracy. This would come as a surprise to the 1.3 million Israeli Arabs who live as second-class citizens in the Jewish state. The poverty rate among Israeli Arabs is more than twice that of the Jewish population. Those Israeli Arabs who marry Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank are not permitted to get Israeli residency for their spouses. And Israeli Arabs, who do not serve in the military or the country’s intelligence services and thus lack the important personal connections and job networks available to veterans, are systematically shut out of good jobs. Any Jew, who may speak no Hebrew or ever been to Israel, can step off a plane and become an Israeli citizen, while a Palestinian living abroad whose family’s roots in Palestine may go back generations is denied citizenship.
The conditions in Palestine and the Gaza strip are already a full-blown humanitarian crisis, yet every time the United Nations gets together to pass a resolution against this display of unilateral violence, the resolution always gets vetoed by the U.S. That’s funny, the U.S. believes in the U.N. only when it is convenient to do so:
But it is in Gaza that conditions are currently reaching a full-blown humanitarian crisis. “Gaza is in its worst condition ever,” Gideon Levy wrote recently in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz. “The Israel Defense Forces have been rampaging through Gaza–there’s no other word to describe it–killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately…. How contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical talk about ‘the end of the occupation’ and ‘partitioning the land’ now appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than before…. This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment.”
And as Gaza descends into civil war, with Hamas and Fatah factions carrying out gun battles in the streets, Ha’aretz reporter Amira Hass bitterly notes, “The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called ‘what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.’”
Go read the rest of the piece. It was written by Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times. And by the way, who are you going to trust, the U.N. & Jimmy Carter, or president Bush and his band of neocons?
These news pieces come by courtesy of the IPS News Service, an awesome, but overlooked in the U.S., news agency.
Take this article by IPS, titled :
“I wish I could flee to any third world country and work in garbage collection rather than stay here and live like a frightened rat,” Adel Mohammed Aziz, a teacher from Baghdad told IPS. “We are all living in fear for our lives; death chases us all around..”
Live in a third world country and work in the garbage, than live in Iraq. How does that square with President’s Bush rosy “we are winning in Iraq” babble talk?
Also, forget about children in Iraq enjoying any of the fruits of the “democracy” Bush has brought there. Not only is Iraq lagging in all health indicators, :
Statistics released by the ministry in October showed that a mere 30 percent of Iraq’s 3.5 million students are currently attending classes. This compares to roughly 75 percent of students who were attending classes the previous year, according to the Britain-based NGO Save the Children.
Just before the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003, school attendance was nearly 100 percent.
Iraqis are forgetting almost what a child needs. Dr. Ahmed Aaraji of the Baghdad Societal Organisation, an Iraqi NGO which monitors the state of Iraqi schools and families in an effort to assist families where possible, is trying to remind everyone what that should be.
[…]Iraq was awarded The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) prize for eradicating illiteracy in 1982. At that time, literacy rates for women were among the highest of all Islamic nations.
(All emphasis is mine)
Not only that, but - yes, even eclipsing the situation in some African nations.
The displacement of Iraqis from Iraq is currently the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis, according to the Washington-based group Refugees International which works towards providing humanitarian assistance and protection for displaced people.
The United Nations estimates that at least 2.3 million Iraqis have fled the growing violence in their country. They estimate that 1.8 million Iraqis have fled to surrounding countries, while another half million have vacated their homes for safer areas within Iraq. An estimated 40,000 people are leaving Iraq every month for Syria alone, according to the UN.
And that is not counting the 600,000 innocent Iraqis that have died in the Iraq War (), so yes, we can conclude that it is pretty fucking bad for Iraqis.
At least, ever-growing faithful readers, you can rest assured that our Decider-in-Chief . The president of the U.S. started a war on false pretenses that thus far has resulted in the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilinas, lost all of our allies, bled the treasury dry, and he’s resting well.
To say the least. This is not news to anyone that has been following the situation in Darfur, but the women in Darfur .
A new study of internally displaced women in Sudan’s South Darfur illuminates the bleak status of women’s mental health in the volatile region. The study, which will be published in January by the International Medical Corps (IMC), found that although humanitarian aid helps meet women’s basic nutritional needs, the mental health of displaced women in Darfur is largely neglected.
Since the Darfur crisis began in 2003, more than 2 million people have been displaced internally within Sudan or have fled to nearby Chad. Though the region is difficult for aid workers and researchers to access, IMC was able to examine displaced women in refugee camps in South Darfur.
It gets worse. Read the rest of the article, and read the report from the International Medical Corps .
While president Bush certainly has to deal with a lot of urgent matters (besides his screw-ups I mean), this is something he should not even get close to:
This administration is currently pushing a plan - the Complex 2030 plan - to ramp up activities at nuclear weapons sites around the country.
This is on the heels of North Korea claiming they have a nuclear bomb, and these assholes want to ramp up nuclear weapons? You have got to be kidding me, but that is the Bush administration for ya!
:
In the Complex 2030 plan this administration has proposed a new $5 billion facility to build the next generation of nuclear weapons. Some local leaders in your area are already arguing that this new plant will create jobs and spur economic development. But the U.S. can create jobs without building the next generation of nuclear weapons that would escalate the arms race and pose a greater threat to our planet.
Current and retired nuclear workers have suffered from cancers, beryllium disease and many others conditions. We all suffer psychological harm from living in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. If these dangerous weapons were ever used, it would be the ultimate medical catastrophe. The U.S. government has moral and legal obligations to eliminate its nuclear weapons, not build new ones.
Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) is one kick-ass group, and they won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize just in case you doubt their credentials.
But pray tell, what can one do about the Complex 2030 plan? More from PSR:
The Department of Energy will soon begin preparing an Environmental Impact Statement for its Complex 2030 plan to revitalize the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. This is the first step in a process established by the National Environmental Policy Act which requires the government to study the impacts of any new major project. As part of this process, DOE will be accepting public comments on the scope of its research on the impacts of the Complex 2030 plan.
[…]The Energy Department is currently accepting comments on the environmental impacts of its Complex 2030 plan. This gives us an opportunity to let our leaders know that this proposal is a step in the wrong direction. The deadline for public comment on this dangerous plan to revitalize the nuclear weapons complex is January 17th, 2006. Please use PSR’s sample comments to develop your own message to the DOE in the space provided. Tell this administration that we do not need new nuclear weapons!
SHANGHAI, Dec. 12 — For people who saw the event on television earlier this month, the scene was like a chilling blast from a past that is 30 years distant: social outcasts and supposed criminals — in this case 100 or so prostitutes and a few pimps — paraded in front of a jeering crowd, their names revealed, and then driven away to jail without trial.
The act of public shaming was intended as the first step in a two-month campaign by the authorities in the southern city of Shenzhen to crack down on prostitution.
This is a picture from the “event”:
Here’s more:
But the event has prompted an angry nationwide backlash, with many people making common cause with the prostitutes over the violation of their human rights and expressing outrage in one online forum after another.
So-called rectification campaigns, or struggle sessions, like these were everyday occurrences during the Cultural Revolution, which officially ended in 1976.
[…]Another asked, “Isn’t this a brutal violation of human rights?” Likening the parading to an act out of the Middle Ages, he added, “Shenzhen’s image has been deeply shamed.”
It said that gender equality benefited both women and children and was pivotal to the health and development of families, communities and nations. Nasir said the report reflected the feelings of the entire humanity. He called for empowering women, and said that Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) had always advocated women’s rights.
The minister called for the elimination of domestic violence, and stressed the need to empower women financially. Shahida Azfar, chief executive of the Family Planning Association of Pakistan, said that the maternal mortality rate was still very high in Pakistan.
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