Please explain what racial-based genocide has to do with Africa's infrastructure. Are you saying the Sudanese government and the Arab militias it uses are committing a racist genocide of blacks from Darfur because they are unhappy with the state of their roads and airports?
I see you're against sactions against Sudan. The Sudanese Arabs have started committing racial genocide in a new part of their country (the western Darfur province) and your idea is lets make sure we don't deprive Sudan's governing elite of anything? Instead we should send them billions in incentives to stop killing off their black citizens.
Why didn't we try that when South Africa was ruled by a white minority government which denied blacks basic citizenship rights (though they were committing genocide)? Maybe instead of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure we should have offered them financial incentives.
BTW: The US is pushing - unsuccessfully - for UN sanctions over Darfur though the US itself has had sanctions on Sudan for years over Sudan's support for terrorism and its human rights abuses against blacks in southern Sudan ( ustreas.gov ). These unilateral sanctions may be the reason Sudan offered to turn Osama bin Ladin over to us back in the '90's before kicking him out of the country and is now negotiating a peace deal with the southerners. I would suggest these facts show sanctions can have a good impact.
Also, since you call for billions in incentives, please indicate what incentives you would like us to provide the Sudan (I assume you're not just talking about bags filled with dollars) and how those incentives would get the Sudanese Arabs to stop killing the blacks in Darfur.
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An especially disturbing feature of these attacks is the clear and intensifying racial animus. This has been reported by Amnesty International, the International Crisis Group and various U.N. spokesmen. The words "ethnic cleansing" have been used by U.N. officials and diplomats. This term, which gained currency during the breakup of Yugoslavia, is another description for genocide. But whatever they are called, the terrible realities in Darfur require that we attend to the ways in which people are being destroyed because of who they are, racially and ethnically -- "as such," to cite the key phrase from the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide.
Darfur is home to racially and ethnically distinct tribal groups. Although virtually all are Muslim, generalizations are hard to make. But the Fur, Zaghawa, Masseleit, and other peoples are accurately described as "African," both in a racial sense and in terms of agricultural practice and use of non-Arabic languages. Darfur also has a large population of nomadic Arab tribal groups, and from these Khartoum has drawn its savage "warriors on horseback" -- the Janjaweed -- who are most responsible for attacks on villages and civilians.
The racial animus is clear from scores of chillingly similar interviews with refugees reaching Chad. A young African man who had lost many family members in an attack heard the gunmen say, "You blacks, we're going to exterminate you." Speaking of these relentless attacks, an African tribal leader told the U.N. news service, "I believe this is an elimination of the black race." A refugee reported these words as coming from his attackers: "You are opponents to the regime, we must crush you. As you are black, you are like slaves. Then the entire Darfur region will be in the hands of the Arabs." An African tribal chief declared that, "The Arabs and the government forces . . . said they wanted to conquer the whole territory and that the blacks did not have a right to remain in the region."
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www.genocidewatch.org/UnnoticedGenocide.htm |
