10,000 Troops to Sudan
This NYT article reports the UNSC has approved a peacekeepingforce of 10,000 troops for the Sudan. But don’t get your hopes up yet. Of the 3600 African Union troops already approved for Darfur, only 2000 are in place after months. These new troops are going to the South and not Darfur. The AU troops in Darfur are not an extensively trained force and arrived with the tags still on their uniforms. Worst yet, their mandate is only to report on the atrocities there, not to intervene.
Council members disagree over placing sanctions on Sudan, an idea opposed by Algeria, China and Russia.
China and Russia have the oil interests in Sudan. Maybe the left can dust off their “no blood for oil” signs and get back out in the streets of Europe. Now there’s talk about trials and they call it justice. But still squabbling on which court.
The Bush administration, which revoked the Clinton administration’s signature on the treaty creating the Hague court, opposes it out of concern that it could bring politically motivated legal actions against Americans abroad.
You think?
In Darfur “ethnic cleansing” by government-supported Arab militias has made refugees of two million villagers and cost the lives of an estimated 300,000 people.
When I first started reporting this story over a year ago, there were only 70,000 dead and 1.2 million refugees. To review, the “Islamic” government in Khartoum has been and continues to bomb, rape, and starve its own citizens. The victims are Sufi African farmers. The Janaweed, militia on horseback, are Arab Sunni herders actively supported by the government. Kharoum methodically blocks and deters all assistance to the victims. The refugees are mostly women and children, and they are slowly dying in the desert without food, shelter, or medicine. Still.
