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23. februar 2005
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Kudos to Nicholas D. Kristof for publishing pictures from the African Union monitors' secret archive of horror pictures from Darfur. Yes, they are disturbing, but you should see them.
There are thousands more of these photos. Many of them show attacks on children and are too horrific for a newspaper.
One wrenching photo in the archive shows the manacled hands of a teenager from the girls' school in Suleia who was burned alive. It's been common for the Sudanese militias to gang-rape teenage girls and then mutilate or kill them.
Another photo shows the body of a young girl, perhaps 10 years old, staring up from the ground where she was killed. Still another shows a man who was castrated and shot in the head.
This archive, including scores of reports by the monitors on the scene, underscores that this slaughter is waged by and with the support of the Sudanese government as it tries to clear the area of non-Arabs. Many of the photos show men in Sudanese Army uniforms pillaging and burning African villages. I hope the African Union will open its archive to demonstrate publicly just what is going on in Darfur.
The archive also includes an extraordinary document seized from a janjaweed official that apparently outlines genocidal policies. Dated last August, the document calls for the "execution of all directives from the president of the republic" and is directed to regional commanders and security officials.
"Change the demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes," the document urges. It encourages "killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur."
It's worth being skeptical of any document because forgeries are possible. But the African Union believes this document to be authentic. I also consulted a variety of experts on Sudan and shared it with some of them, and the consensus was that it appears to be real.
So the AU reports back to their government that a genocide is taking place. I have no doubt that the UN has access to these documents and pictures, yet declared no genocide is taking place so we don't have to do anything (shades of Clinton about Rwanda).
During past genocides against Armenians, Jews and Cambodians, it was possible to claim that we didn't fully know what was going on. This time, President Bush, Congress and the European Parliament have already declared genocide to be under way. And we have photos.
This time, we have no excuse.
Nick has that one right. Steve Green has it right, too:
The US, to be taken seriously when we speak of equal rights in the Arab world, must do more.
Germany, the country responsible for industrialized genocide, needs to lead the moral charge.
The French, who can't stop mucking about in West Africa, should meddle someplace where they might do a little good.
Britain, former co-administrator (with Egypt) of Sudan, has enough local expertise to help.
The UN needs to lead, follow, or get out of the way.
And Arabs, the ones most responsible for this racist war, need to be treated more like responsible grownups by the West, and less like wogs who just don't know any better.
I wonder how determined China and Russia would be to defend the Sudanese government if the heat was really turned up? In the end, it wouldn't really matter. If the two stopped a Security Council resolution, it would just further delegitimize the UN (which would hurt them more than it would hurt the US). It would then be up to a coalition of the willing, preferrably mostly African. The question is if there would be any willing to fill that coalition.
5:37:42 PM 
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I have read and linked to countless Mark Steyn columns in the past, but I honestly can't remember any so downbeat on the European-US relationship as his last: Atlanticist small talk is all that's left. Does he really believe the US and France have absolutely nothing in common anymore? Apparently.
A few months before 9/11, I happened to find myself sitting next to an eminent older statesman. "What is Nato for?" he wondered. "Well, you should know," I said. "You were secretary-general. You went into the office every day." With hindsight, he was asking the right question. On the other hand, if Nato is useless to America, it looks like being a goldmine for the Chinese, to whom the Europeans are bent on selling their military technology. Jacques Chirac is pitching this outreach to the politburo in lofty terms, modifying Harold Macmillan and casting Europe as Athens to China's Rome. I can't see it working, but the very attempt presumes that the transatlantic relationship is now bereft of meaning.
Steyn even predicts that Nato will not exist around 2015. The unusually depressed column ends like this:
So what would you do in Bush's shoes? Slap 'em around a bit? What for? Where would it get you? Or would you do exactly what he's doing? Climb into the old soup-and-fish, make small talk with Mme Chirac and raise a glass of champagne to the enduring friendship of our peoples: what else is left? This week we're toasting the end of an idea: the death of "the West".
So is the idea of "the west" dead?
France and Germany's foreign policies are essentially carved from a business point of view. Morality doesn't come into it. The Iraq war was bad for business. "Stability" in Middle East dictatures is good for business. Rwanda, Barfur doesn't register on the business scale. The Ivory Coast has chocolate, so it needs a quick unilateral foreign intervention. And, crucially, selling modern weapons and technology to China is good for business. Good for the arms business, anyway.
But even appeasement Europe anno 1938 weren't selling Germany the weapons to bury them. Steel, yes. But not the guns. That is how far appeasement Europe anno 2005 has declined.
2:03:52 PM
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You may have seen the pundit flamewars over female op-eds, but it falls to Kevin Drum to ask the obvious question about the lack of female top bloggers.
The political blogosphere provides another clue. Although its geeky Usenet roots were (and are) testosterone laden affairs, there are still no formal barriers to entry here, no old boys club in the usual meaning of the word. Yet if you take a look at the Blogosphere Ecosystem, which for all its faults is probably the closest thing we have to a consensus measure of popularity for political blogs, you will find exactly three women in the top 30: Michelle Malkin, La Shawn Barber, and Michele Catalano. (There are a few group blogs in the top 30, but those are very heavily male dominated too.)
That's a grand total of 10% of the most popular political blogs. And to gaze even more deeply into our collective navel, that 10% is 100% conservative. On the liberal side, Wonkette weighs in at #33 and TalkLeft at #48 — and that's it for liberal women in the top 100, unless I've missed someone.
Kevin is a brave man for even raising the subject. However, Michele is not amused.
I don't even dare thinking about the answer to this question, but even though blogging has no formal barriers, the big bloggers are typically the early bloggers, and Internet thingys have for a long time been a male geek domain. Big bloggers link to other big bloggers. They like reading each other, and these blogiarchs form the self-sustaining top of the blogosphere.
Maybe it can serve as a hint to how the testosterone-laden top blososphere reacts to female bloggers, if we recall the reaction when Wonkette started up. If anything was a blogosphere version of the classical bimbo, all cutesy and hints of anal sex and not much obvious brain to challenge the patriarchy, she was it. Of course, the big male bloggers were fawning all over her...
2:18:50 AM
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Iran keeps targeting bloggers and journalists:
An Iranian journalist was jailed for 14 years on charges ranging from espionage to insulting the country's leaders in an unusually heavy sentence in Iran, where tens of journalists have been tried in recent years.
Rights activists said on Tuesday that Arash Sigarchi, 28, was convicted by the Revolutionary Court in the Caspian province of Gilan in northern Iran.
Sigarchi, a newspaper editor in Gilan who also wrote an Internet journal or "weblog," was arrested last month after responding to a summons from the Intelligence Ministry.
"In total, he has been given 14 years in prison," Mohammad Saifzadeh, a member of Center for Defense of Human Rights in Tehran told Reuters by telephone.
Utterly outrageous! The Mullahs are really, really scared, because the Iranian people hate them.
1:23:54 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.03.2005; 01:30:57.
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