D.Long, What a tremendously brilliant strategy- touch off genocide in Kosovo and bomb Serbia back into the Stone Age- that should certainly assure stability in an already unstable region!
We are going to be stuck with multibillion dollar peacekeeping missions all over this region for years and I mean years- remember the SFOR Force in Bosnia was supposed to be out in one year? Well it's Year Three and counting and we're still in Bosnia- that's billions of dollars annually that are poured into just that one mission....
Here's where we should be helping-in the Sudan....
[ Latest News From Sudan At Sudan.Net ]
News Article by WT on April 12, 1999 at 12:55:13:
Sudan's forgotten war
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 11, 1999
EDITORIAL
As Rwanda held a mass funeral this week to bury 20,000 of those killed in
its 1994 genocide, the United States came under scrutiny for ignoring
warnings of those impending killings. Five years after that genocide,
Sudanese villagers from Maridi ask why the United States government isn't
helping protect them, and they have reason to ask. These Southern Sudanese
tribal people hid in foxholes last month as the Sudanese government's
National Islamic Front (NIF) dropped anti-personnel bombs on the village
around their two churches, and a week earlier, around their hospital.
"Almost 2 million people have died in Sudan in the past 15 years - more
than have died in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Chechnya combined, "
Congressman Frank Wolf, Virginia Republican, said last week at a joint
press conference with the mission team Sharing of Ministries Abroad (SOMA)
that was in Maridi with the villagers. The cumulative deaths are the
result of calculated starvation and the bombings of hospitals and refugee
camps by Sudan's Islamic government, the Center for Religious Freedom
says, and Mr. Wolf called the bombings "part of the government's policy of
genocide."
Before Scott Field, SOMA's president, traveled to the Sudan last month, it
was hard for him to believe hospitals and churches would be intentional
NIF targets. But after those buildings were the first to be attacked, it
was hard for him to think otherwise. "As a former Navy bombardier, it was
clear to me, that they were not in any way shape or form trying to hit
military targets," he said. "There were no military targets. These were
civilians, hospitals and churches."
Mr. Wolf asked the U.S. administration to step up its role in helping the
peace process in the complex North-South Sudanese civil war and not be
satisfied with the faltering Inter-Governmental Authority for Development
peace initiative introduced in 1993. His call to action is well-founded.
Though the Clinton administration and the State Department have been made
aware of the slavery of thousands of women and children, widespread famine
and tribal warfare that continue to cause mass deaths in the Sudan (the
department's web site is full of the gruesome statistics), no lasting,
serious plan of action has been taken.
"You could paper your bathroom with the letters [Ohio Democratic Rep.]
Tony Hall and I have sent over to the State Department," Mr. Wolf said.
"We have sent letters to [Secretary of State] Mrs. [Madeleine] Albright,
to [National Security adviser] Sandy Berger, to the president. They have
done nothing," Mr. Wolf said.
But why should they? The intertribal conflict there has lasted for 15
years and is incredibly complex. Though the National Islamic Front (NIF),
which controls most Sudanese government activity, has been blamed as the
aggressors against the Christians and animists of the south, the Sudan
People's Liberation Army of the South has also killed en masse. The last
weekend in March alone, they admitted to killing 405 government troops in
eastern Sudan. And as even the missionaries admitted, government bombs do
not have a religion detector on them. Given that this long-term war is a
mix of religious, political and ethnic conflicts, and that the "villains"
may be active on both sides of the war, it appears to be a war left best
alone.
But that argument only holds if Americans ignore the fact that the Sudan
has been on the State Department's terrorist list since 1993 and serves as
a continuing haven for anti-American terrorists -including Osama bin
Laden, Hezbollah and Hamas.
As long as the United States continues to "negotiate" with a government
that shelters terrorists, makes its targets churches and hospitals, and
defenseless women and children, there is little hope for improvement in
the Sudan. It is certainly not time for the United States to be waging
three military campaigns at once, but to allow the status quo to continue
in Sudan will leave the door open for continued international terrorist
activity as well as the deaths and enslavement of thousands more in the
region.
"I was born in war, I'm growing old in war, and I'm going to die in war,"
a woman from Maridi told the mission group. She's probably right, if no
outside mediator intervenes.
"We had to apologize about Rwanda," Mr. Wolf said. "Here's an opportunity
not to apologize." Let's hope we won't have to. |
