Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Darfur - an opportunity and a test

Cold, Lonely and Tired

I'm not feeling that way, at least not now, thank God, but I read that phrase in a book and it reminded me of times in the past when I did feel that way. It wasn't fun, to say the least. It was very difficult and confusing. I mean, the words aren't really there to describe my dark phases but I also know, deep in my heart, that what seemed dark to me is really just a cloud cover to someone else. I haven't hit the bottom of human despair and hopefully never will. Maybe I don't possess that depth to my character and emotions. Maybe I'm just too superficial. Either way, I'm glad to dodge that bullet, if indeed I have dodged it.

I try to help other people in my own feeble way. My heart goes out to people in suffering. I really admire that NBA Cleveland Cavaliers player Ira Newble for his effort to get signatures on an open letter to the government of China regarding its investments and business dealings in Sudan -- where hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions have become refugees in Darfur Province. I want to help. And I'm happy that he wants to help. Sports and politics are uneasy bedfellows but there is plenty of precedent for it; example: Jackie Robinson. Olympics and South Africa. Olympics and Black Power. That kid Newble is less self-absorbed, I assume, than the average athlete.

So today I seek more information about Darfur and have turned up several nuggets for consideration. The most interesting nugget so far has been the counter to the genocide portrayal. I'm not well-informed at this moment, but I am trying to become informed and to that end, I'm reading up on both sides of the story.

One fact about the Darfur situation is Darfur, a region in western Sudan, is in a continuing armed conflict, mostly between the Janjaweed (comprised of Arab-identifying Sudanese) and the non-Arab Sudanese.

My heart is moved and I can only imagine the plight of people who are living through this civil conflict. I don't have any particular link to be able to help right now, but I hope to find some way soon.

I also don't feel that we should go in militarily and deny the sovereignty of Darfur the way we did in Iraq. I especially don't want to see African leaders just steamrollered, since I'm African-American. However, is this a reason for non-intervention?

Who cares whether the Sudan government has a written plan to genocide Africans or not? They are sponsoring the killing of between 200,000 and 500,000 and still continuing. Let's condemn these killings with maximum intensity. Let's point the finger at the perpetrators and pursue the cease and desist of it immediately.

Clearly there are several points of view to be considered: Western, Arab and African sources need to be considered.


In the meantime, here's the info I've been reading:

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/05/30/asia/AS-GEN-China-US-Sudan.php
US briefs China on move to sanction Sudan for its role in Darfur
The Associated PressPublished: May 30, 2007

"BEIJING: The U.S. briefed China on Wednesday about the administration's plans to introduce a new U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning Sudan's government for failing to do enough to halt the bloodshed in Darfur."

"The U.S., which has condemned the crisis in Darfur as genocide, has long pushed for a tougher stance against Sudan's government, while China has consistently opposed attempts to pressure Khartoum, saying the issue should be resolved through diplomatic negotiations.

"Hill refused to talk about the gap in their positions, and gave few additional details about his conversation with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei. He said [that] he expressed support for China's decision to send engineers to Darfur to support a small force of U.N. peacekeepers that Sudan has agreed to."

http://www.darfurinfo.org/

From http://www.darfurgenocide.org/index.php

"The ongoing Darfur Genocide is no accident, no local tribal conflict. The genocide is the brutal plan of three men in the Sudanese national Government -- President Bashir, Vice-President Taha, Security Chief Gosh. Now they are spreading their system of terror to other African countries, including Chad and the Central African Republic . Yet our governments continue to cut deals with them - deals they repeatedly break. It is time for the US and European governments to stop appeasing genocide. We call on our governments to fully support the International Criminal Court to indict the perpetrators of genocide, and to help ensure their arrest. It is time for justice, because only justice can bring peace. "

http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/sudan/about/

A counter definition and opinion. Should we consider both sides of the story?

The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency by Mahmood Mamdani
NEWS STORY Friday, March 23, 2007
Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His most recent book is Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.
This article originally appeared in the London Review of Books

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/mamd01_.html
There several letters to the editor regarding the article are published, as well as a response from Mamood Mamdani, published 26 April 2007.

Also published in full at http://www.sudanembassy.org/default.asp?page=viewstory&id=485

"At a press conference at the UN on 23 September 2004 Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the violence in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very clear:
Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence. "

"The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention."

"Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (‘race’) and, if not that, certainly in ‘culture’. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer."

"The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror."

From the footnotes of the London Book Review article:
‘Those tribes in Darfur who support rebels have increasingly come to be identified as “African” and those supporting the government as the “Arabs”. A good example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African tribe that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as having been “Arabised”.’ On the other hand, this development was being promoted from the outside: ‘The Arab-African divide has also been fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some circles and in the media.’

Darfur Crisis
By Mahmood Mamdani
29 October, 2004
Black Commentator
http://www.countercurrents.org/darfur-mamdani291004.htm

"What Should We Do?
First of all, we the civilians - and I address Africans and Americans in particular - should work against a military solution. We should work against a US intervention, whether direct or by proxy, and however disguised - as humanitarian or whatever. We should work against punitive sanctions. The lesson of Iraq sanctions is that you target individuals, not governments. Sanctions feed into a culture of terror, of collective punishment. Its victims are seldom its target. Both military intervention and sanctions are undesirable and ineffective."

"Finally, there is need to beware of groups who want a simple and comprehensive explanation, even if it is misleading; who demand dramatic action, even if it backfires; who have so come to depend on crisis that they risk unwittingly aggravating existing crisis. Often, they use the call for urgent action to silence any debate as a luxury. And yet, responsible action needs to be informed."

"For the African Union, Darfur is both an opportunity and a test. The opportunity is to build on the global concern over a humanitarian disaster in Darfur to set a humanitarian standard that must be observed by all, including America's allies in Africa. And the test is to defend African sovereignty in the face of official America's global "war on terror." On both counts, the first priority must be to stop the war and push the peace process."

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/41564
The politics of apologetics: genocide denial, Darfur version
Kwesi Kwaa Prah (2007-05-22)
Kwesi Kwaa Prah critiques Mahmood Mamdani's writings on Darfur. He posits: 'Mamdani indulges in technicist sophistry, tip-toeing nimbly around the real issues in Darfur and effectively providing solace to the Khartoum regime.'

A lot of thoughts

Dealing with a 14 year old young man and staring my 53rd birthday dead in the face . . . seems like a weird juxtaposition of events.

I don't have a teenager, I have a 7 year old who wants to be a teenager.

But enough about them, I find me more fascinating :)

Actually, there isn't probably any one thread I can use to tie all my recent thoughts together but I want to try.

Soul Hunger
Critical Thinking
Best Friend Forever Mother
Humility and Forgiveness
Making every day Count
Family Routine

It's a blessing to have a family. The bible says God puts the lonely in families. Family gives us our place, the belonging place. That is our foundation and it's much more than I ever knew when I first wanted a baby. Luckily, I learned more about how to make a family as I went along and was it a hard lesson. Still learning that lesson, too. That "loneliness" is a form of soul hunger and the instinct to make family is the human drive to fill the emptiness of life. That's not to say that all lives without families are empty but it takes a lot to fill the emptiness; family seems like a built in mechanism to make it happen a little easier.

Most of us learned how to nourish our bodies and their are enough fast food joints on most corners to give us the illusion of nutrition and to at least fill the belly. We don't necessarily learn to nourish our souls and reach satisfaction in the heart. I use the word contentment to describe that soul satisfaction.

What creates contentment, inner peace? How the hell am I supposed to know? I just posed the question! But really, religions and self-help industries have been formed to answer that question so I don't presume to even go there. But without some way of nourishing one's soul, one walks through life hungry, perhaps ravenous, on the soul level. Empty and aching and perhaps confused, a person can get horribly lost and twisted.

That brings me both to critical thinking and to best friend mother. Both are ways to unravel the twists and turns and ease the aches of soul starvation and straighten out the faulty thinking and twisted characters that can result from the lack of both. I think we need both a nurturing and accepting mother self and an analytical and methodical critical-thinking self. Those two being war in me and most of the time the critic wins.

So that's where humility and forgiveness comes in and makes it possible for me to live with myself, despite all the mistakes I am prone to make. Knowing I am a fallen and flawed human being, I can yet freely admit that and ask forgiveness of the person/people I do or might offend. I can say "I was wrong" or "I was foolish" or "Man, that was silly of me." Saying that, I don't take pride in it or get there easily but I can eventually get there. It's not easy to admit one's errors or even to see them, but seeing them and seeing oneself as fallible makes one easier to live with and to be a family with. Somehow this notion isn't a popular one and I think it's because of Darwin, and his survival of the fittest notion. We want to see ourselves as "the fittest" so that we can see ourselves as winners and at least as survivors. However, I think this evolutionary treadmill theory taints our thinking and puts us in a competitive mode all the time. Or I could be wrong and it actually is a natural law (like gravity) and we are truly going to get hunted down by the alpha dog and eliminated if we admit to a weakness. Hmmm . . . I'll stick with my humility and forgiveness story, at least for now.

Now I come to making every day count. I get there by virtue of pulling up hard on 53. Never give up, never surrender. Every day dawns and offers a new beginning. Renewal. Rejuvenation. Lots of forces rally against those truths. The cycle of life and the circle of life and the rut of living. No matter what we do, we are part of the circle of life yet we don't have to stay in the rut of living. At least not in America. At least not most of us. That's the theory of the American Dream anyway. So I say, make every day count, one new word at a time, one new thought at a time. Keep hope alive, basically. Thanks, Jesse.

And the family routine, as much of a rut as it can be, still serves us well. It gives us a foundation, a base to start each of those new dawns. We can get our faces washed, teeth brushed, clothes on, that cup of coffee, and get fueled in our bodies and in our souls to start this day off with the notion that every day counts, we can start over, we can be forgiven for being the wretch that we are, we can still count on mom and dad despite being a fickle 14 year old, we can still count on hubby / wife despite being an aging hausfrau/house husband. We can start this day knowing we can both think analytically and nurture others; and knowing that we can benefit from others nurture and clear thinking.

That's it; that's all.

Monday, May 14, 2007

What's going on? Homeschooling for 3 more weeks, remodeling, shopping for new furniture, painting, reinstalling new fireplace mantel, new carpet, joined WeightWatchers for the first time, sauna and swimming and walking.

Blogging is getting further down the list, unfortunately.

I started the weight loss trail on year ago. I lost 48 and put back on 13 so I've lost 35 total. I am hoping to lost at least 20 more this summer, and more for the rest of this year. I took a break from Thanksgiving through end of April, so it actually isn't to awfully bad.