Remember, Check Your Sources
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/international/middleeast/26FTE_NOTE.html?ex=1400990400&en=94c17fcffad92ca9&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
A major newspaper wishes it had been more aggressive in re-examining some claims.
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
FUTURE PAPERS WILL BE E-PAPERS;
ONLINE NEWSPAPER READERSHIP UP 350% OVER 5 YEARS
The audience for online versions of newspapers has grown 350% over
the past five years, according to the World Association of Newspapers,
which notes that while print circulation figures have declined in mature
markets like Europe and the U.S., they are sharply up in emerging markets
like China and India. In Russia, the number of published dailies has nearly
doubled in two years. WAN attributed the increase in online newspaper
popularity to the growth of broadband in many countries, noting that in
those countries where broadband Internet access is more readily available,
people are watching TV less and surfing the Web more, both for news and for
entertainment. (BBC News 1 Jun 2004)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3767267.stm
ONLINE NEWSPAPER READERSHIP UP 350% OVER 5 YEARS
The audience for online versions of newspapers has grown 350% over
the past five years, according to the World Association of Newspapers,
which notes that while print circulation figures have declined in mature
markets like Europe and the U.S., they are sharply up in emerging markets
like China and India. In Russia, the number of published dailies has nearly
doubled in two years. WAN attributed the increase in online newspaper
popularity to the growth of broadband in many countries, noting that in
those countries where broadband Internet access is more readily available,
people are watching TV less and surfing the Web more, both for news and for
entertainment. (BBC News 1 Jun 2004)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3767267.stm
Hi we were talking about voice a few weeks ago. Here is a rather difficult part of an article from The New Yorker magazine by by LOUIS MENAND about voice that is worth reading:
One of the most mysterious of writing’s immaterial properties is what people call “voice.” Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as “the voice on the page.” Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the “voice.” There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn’t insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn’t, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular—any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn’t.
When it does appear, the subject is often irrelevant. “I do not care for movies very much and I rarely see them,” W. H. Auden wrote to the editors of The Nation in 1944. “Further, I am suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals without love. I am all the more surprised, therefore, to find myself not only reading Mr. Agee before I read anyone else in The Nation but also consciously looking forward all week to reading him again.” A lot of the movies that James Agee reviewed between 1942 and 1948, when he was The Nation’s film critic, were negligible then and are forgotten now. But you can still read his columns with pleasure. They continue to pass the ultimate test of good writing: it is more painful to stop reading them than it is to keep going. When you get to the end of Agee’s sentences, you wish, like Auden, that there were more sentences.
Writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality. But whose personality is it? As with all art, there is no straight road from the product back to the producer. There are writers loved for their humor who are not funny people, and writers admired for their eloquence who swallow their words, never look you in the eye, and can’t seem to finish a sentence. Wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom in the writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlates with a high I.Q.: they just seem to have very little to do with one another. Witty and charming people can produce prose of sneering sententiousness, and fretful neurotics can, to their readers, seem as though they must be delightful to live with. Personal drabness, through some obscure neural kink, can deliver verbal blooms. Readers who meet a writer whose voice they have fallen in love with usually need to make a small adjustment afterward in order to hang on to the infatuation.
The uncertainty about what it means for writing to have a voice arises from the metaphor itself. Writers often claim that they never write something that they would not say. It is hard to know how this could be literally true. Speech is somatic, a bodily function, and it is accompanied by physical inflections—tone of voice, winks, smiles, raised eyebrows, hand gestures—that are not reproducible in writing. Spoken language is repetitive, fragmentary, contradictory, limited in vocabulary, loaded down with space holders (“like,” “um,” “you know”)—all the things writing teachers tell students not to do. And yet people can generally make themselves understood right away. As a medium, writing is a million times weaker than speech. It’s a hieroglyph competing with a symphony.
The other reason that speech is a bad metaphor for writing is that writing, for ninety-nine per cent of people who do it, is the opposite of spontaneous. Some writers write many drafts of a piece; some write one draft, at the pace of a snail after a night on the town. But chattiness, slanginess, in-your-face-ness, and any other features of writing that are conventionally characterized as “like speech” are usually the results of laborious experimentation, revision, calibration, walks around the block, unnecessary phone calls, and recalibration. Writers, by nature, tend to be people in whom l’esprit de l’escalier is a recurrent experience: they are always thinking of the perfect riposte after the moment for saying it has passed. So they take a few years longer and put it in print. Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right—so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.
Does this mean that the written “voice” is never spontaneous and natural but always an artificial construction of language? This is not a proposition that most writers could accept. The act of writing is personal; it feels personal. The unfunny person who is a humorous writer does not think, of her work, “That’s not really me.” Critics speak of “the persona,” a device for compelling, in the interests of licensing the interpretative impulse, a divorce between author and text. But no one, or almost no one, writes “as a persona.” People write as people, and if there were nothing personal about the result few human beings would try to manufacture it for a living. Composition is a troublesome, balky, sometimes sleep-depriving business. What makes it especially so is that the rate of production is beyond the writer’s control. You have to wait, and what you are waiting for is something inside you to come up with the words. That something, for writers, is the voice.
A better basis than speaking for the metaphor of voice in writing is singing. You can’t tell if someone can sing or not from the way she talks, and although “natural phrasing” and “from the heart” are prized attributes of song, singing that way requires rehearsal, preparation, and getting in touch with whatever it is inside singers that, by a neural kink or the grace of God, enables them to turn themselves into vessels of musical sound. Truss is right (despite what she preaches) when she implies, by her own practice, that the rules really don’t have that much to do with it. Before Luciano Pavarotti walked onstage at the opera house, he was in the habit of taking a bite of an apple. That’s how he helped his voice to sound spontaneous and natural.
What writers hear when they are trying to write is something more like singing than like speaking. Inside your head, you’re yakking away to yourself all the time. Getting that voice down on paper is a depressing experience. When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music. This writing voice is the voice that people are surprised not to encounter when they “meet the writer.” The writer is not so surprised. Writers labor constantly under the anxiety that this voice, though they have found it a hundred times before, has disappeared forever, and that they will never hear it again. Some writers, when they begin a new piece, spend hours rereading their old stuff, trying to remember how they did it, what it’s supposed to sound like. This rarely works; nothing works reliably. Sooner or later, usually later than everyone involved would have preferred, the voice shows up, takes a bite of the apple, and walks onstage.
One of the most mysterious of writing’s immaterial properties is what people call “voice.” Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as “the voice on the page.” Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the “voice.” There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn’t insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn’t, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular—any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn’t.
When it does appear, the subject is often irrelevant. “I do not care for movies very much and I rarely see them,” W. H. Auden wrote to the editors of The Nation in 1944. “Further, I am suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals without love. I am all the more surprised, therefore, to find myself not only reading Mr. Agee before I read anyone else in The Nation but also consciously looking forward all week to reading him again.” A lot of the movies that James Agee reviewed between 1942 and 1948, when he was The Nation’s film critic, were negligible then and are forgotten now. But you can still read his columns with pleasure. They continue to pass the ultimate test of good writing: it is more painful to stop reading them than it is to keep going. When you get to the end of Agee’s sentences, you wish, like Auden, that there were more sentences.
Writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality. But whose personality is it? As with all art, there is no straight road from the product back to the producer. There are writers loved for their humor who are not funny people, and writers admired for their eloquence who swallow their words, never look you in the eye, and can’t seem to finish a sentence. Wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom in the writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlates with a high I.Q.: they just seem to have very little to do with one another. Witty and charming people can produce prose of sneering sententiousness, and fretful neurotics can, to their readers, seem as though they must be delightful to live with. Personal drabness, through some obscure neural kink, can deliver verbal blooms. Readers who meet a writer whose voice they have fallen in love with usually need to make a small adjustment afterward in order to hang on to the infatuation.
The uncertainty about what it means for writing to have a voice arises from the metaphor itself. Writers often claim that they never write something that they would not say. It is hard to know how this could be literally true. Speech is somatic, a bodily function, and it is accompanied by physical inflections—tone of voice, winks, smiles, raised eyebrows, hand gestures—that are not reproducible in writing. Spoken language is repetitive, fragmentary, contradictory, limited in vocabulary, loaded down with space holders (“like,” “um,” “you know”)—all the things writing teachers tell students not to do. And yet people can generally make themselves understood right away. As a medium, writing is a million times weaker than speech. It’s a hieroglyph competing with a symphony.
The other reason that speech is a bad metaphor for writing is that writing, for ninety-nine per cent of people who do it, is the opposite of spontaneous. Some writers write many drafts of a piece; some write one draft, at the pace of a snail after a night on the town. But chattiness, slanginess, in-your-face-ness, and any other features of writing that are conventionally characterized as “like speech” are usually the results of laborious experimentation, revision, calibration, walks around the block, unnecessary phone calls, and recalibration. Writers, by nature, tend to be people in whom l’esprit de l’escalier is a recurrent experience: they are always thinking of the perfect riposte after the moment for saying it has passed. So they take a few years longer and put it in print. Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right—so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.
Does this mean that the written “voice” is never spontaneous and natural but always an artificial construction of language? This is not a proposition that most writers could accept. The act of writing is personal; it feels personal. The unfunny person who is a humorous writer does not think, of her work, “That’s not really me.” Critics speak of “the persona,” a device for compelling, in the interests of licensing the interpretative impulse, a divorce between author and text. But no one, or almost no one, writes “as a persona.” People write as people, and if there were nothing personal about the result few human beings would try to manufacture it for a living. Composition is a troublesome, balky, sometimes sleep-depriving business. What makes it especially so is that the rate of production is beyond the writer’s control. You have to wait, and what you are waiting for is something inside you to come up with the words. That something, for writers, is the voice.
A better basis than speaking for the metaphor of voice in writing is singing. You can’t tell if someone can sing or not from the way she talks, and although “natural phrasing” and “from the heart” are prized attributes of song, singing that way requires rehearsal, preparation, and getting in touch with whatever it is inside singers that, by a neural kink or the grace of God, enables them to turn themselves into vessels of musical sound. Truss is right (despite what she preaches) when she implies, by her own practice, that the rules really don’t have that much to do with it. Before Luciano Pavarotti walked onstage at the opera house, he was in the habit of taking a bite of an apple. That’s how he helped his voice to sound spontaneous and natural.
What writers hear when they are trying to write is something more like singing than like speaking. Inside your head, you’re yakking away to yourself all the time. Getting that voice down on paper is a depressing experience. When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music. This writing voice is the voice that people are surprised not to encounter when they “meet the writer.” The writer is not so surprised. Writers labor constantly under the anxiety that this voice, though they have found it a hundred times before, has disappeared forever, and that they will never hear it again. Some writers, when they begin a new piece, spend hours rereading their old stuff, trying to remember how they did it, what it’s supposed to sound like. This rarely works; nothing works reliably. Sooner or later, usually later than everyone involved would have preferred, the voice shows up, takes a bite of the apple, and walks onstage.
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Where is the Sudan? Read this and guess. Then find out were it is and check it out. Why is this happening there? This is your assignment for this week. What would be the resons for this to happen there and now? Find some outside sources like the U.N. and CIA sites on countries. Good Luck. See you on Thur. Clark
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Another Problem From Hell
By John HeffernanThe American Prospect. Posted July 3, 2004.
A human-rights expert who has witnessed the persecution in Darfur insists that genocide is occuring. A dispatch from Sudan.
Thirty-five-year-old Azine (not her real name) is still in shock at what happened to her in Western Darfur, Sudan, four months ago. One morning, soldiers entered her village, burned her house, and forced her to flee with her four children. She and her family now live in a refugee camp in Farchana, Chad, in a tent provided by the United Nations. On a recent day at the camp, she described what happened to her in the Sudan:
"At around 5 a.m., helicopters and Sudanese military Antonovs circled the village," she said. Later, four men wearing Sudanese military uniforms entered her house and took all her property, then set the house on fire.
"My husband had fled first for fear that he might be killed," she continued, describing what appears to be a common pattern among Darfurian villagers attacked over the last several months. As the men in the village get wind of impending attacks, they flee at once – knowing that they will be killed if they stay – leaving the women and children behind. The male villagers know that the women will be raped, but probably not killed. That is, unless they resist.
Of the 300 families from this village, about 25 people were killed and about 15 wounded. Azine's sister ran away from the attackers and was shot and killed, along with her 3-year-old daughter.
Since early 2003, tens of thousands of Sudanese citizens of African descent who live in the Darfur region have been systematically killed, raped, and displaced as their villages have been destroyed. Through coordinated land and air attacks; the burning of homes and crops; the rounding up of livestock; the destruction of wells, granaries, and irrigation works; the uprooting of trees; and the theft of all possessions, the government of Sudan and the government-supported Arab militia, Janjaweed, have displaced more than 1 million people.
Thousands are now wandering the drought-stricken, barren landscape, while tens of thousands are reportedly being held in prison enclaves in cities and villages throughout Darfur. An additional 200,000 Darfurians have crossed the eastern border of Sudan, seeking refuge in Chad, as Azine did after her village was destroyed.
For several months, experts from humanitarian and human-rights groups and the United Nations have predicted that tens of thousands of internally displaced persons in Sudan will die unless they receive major international humanitarian support. According to some reports, the early stages of those grim predictions have already been realized.
In May 2004, as part of a Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) emergency investigation, in partnership with the Open Society Institute's Justice Initiative, I arrived in this region along the Chadian-Sudanese border to assess human-rights and humanitarian law violations of the Darfur civilians and the risk of morbidity and mortality among the refugees driven from their homes in that region.
Jennifer Leaning, a physician who teaches a course in humanitarian emergencies, and I spent two weeks traveling extensively throughout eastern Chad. We traversed several thousand kilometers in order to assess the situation and to conduct interviews with refugees in camps and in other places along the Chadian-Sudanese border. We wanted to gather testimony from refugees who came from different parts of Darfur about the timing, nature, and targets of the attacks, to collect information on the attacking forces and the way they pursued villagers and local Sudanese to the border of Chad.
We recorded dozens of refugee testimonies that indigenous African civilians – primarily from the Fur, Masilit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups – are being targeted by the Sudanese government and its Arab-Janjaweed militia because of their ethnicity. There is ample evidence to indicate that an organized campaign on the part of the Sudanese government is under way, targeting several million people from this region of the country either by killing them or forcing them to migrate. Without an immediate and concerted international intervention, a substantial part of the targeted group may be eliminated. Current predictions from governmental and nongovernmental sources suggest that the toll could be between 300,000 and 1 million if a robust intervention does not occur.
PHR is calling the forcible removal of black African Darfurians from their land, the total destruction of villages and livelihood, and the deliberate obstruction of aid indicators of genocide that warrant immediate intervention. An intervention, ideally backed by a UN Security Council resolution – which supports the protection of humanitarian supply lines, disarms the militia groups, ensures the cessation of violence and a withdrawal of Sudanese government forces in Darfur, allows for the safe return of internally displaced persons and refugees to their land, and provides human-rights monitors – is necessary. Simultaneously, PHR calls on the United States to ramp up its humanitarian assistance and to impose targeted sanctions on Sudanese government officials (including freezing assets and access to U.S. capital markets). In addition, PHR is discovering signs of genocide that may put international agencies and other countries under an obligation to act to prevent and punish the perpetrators.
The Bush administration has been a leading force on the UN Security Council on matters concerning Darfur, but it has not determined that genocide has taken place. In addition, the Bush administration has been unwilling to push for a UN resolution seeking an intervention.
The administration should take a harder position with the Khartoum government, including support for a UN Security Council resolution that calls for intervention under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Its current approach may be the result of the administration's concern about jeopardizing the long-awaited peace-signing process that would end the decades-long war between the Arab north and the Christian south. Talks between the Sudanese government and rebels from the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) will soon take place in Naivasha, Kenya, focusing on security and a permanent ceasefire – as well as possible autonomy for the South. Moreover, the Iraq conflict may have taken its toll on U.S. diplomatic efforts elsewhere.
Without a more robust response to the crisis in Darfur, thousands will perish inside Sudan and refugees like Azine will continue to languish in refugee camps with little hope of returning home anytime soon. What's at stake here is enormous and clear: a moral obligation by the United States and the international community to prevent another genocide from occurring under their watch.
Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: John Heffernan, "Another Problem From Hell", The American Prospect Online, Jun 30, 2004. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.
John Heffernan, who has worked in Khartoum, Sudan, documenting persecution stories of Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees, is a senior communications associate for Physicians for Human Rights. He lives in Washington, D.C
Search AlterNet:
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IN SPECIAL COVERAGE
Election 2004:
Californians Head East to Make a Difference
Jan Frel
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Ford Gets an 'F' for Fuel Efficiency
Kari Lydersen
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A Eulogy for Marlon Brando
Dave Zirin
MediaCulture:
Fahrenheit 9/11: Firing Up the Choir
Peter Y. Sussman
Rights and Liberties:
A Patriotic Celebration of Civil Liberties
Mona Lisa Yuchengo
DrugReporter:
From Abu Ghraib to Your Local Prison
Matthew Briggs
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The 'Prop-agenda' War
Miren Gutierrez
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Susan Kreimer
SUPPORT ALTERNET
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Another Problem From Hell
By John HeffernanThe American Prospect. Posted July 3, 2004.
A human-rights expert who has witnessed the persecution in Darfur insists that genocide is occuring. A dispatch from Sudan.
Thirty-five-year-old Azine (not her real name) is still in shock at what happened to her in Western Darfur, Sudan, four months ago. One morning, soldiers entered her village, burned her house, and forced her to flee with her four children. She and her family now live in a refugee camp in Farchana, Chad, in a tent provided by the United Nations. On a recent day at the camp, she described what happened to her in the Sudan:
"At around 5 a.m., helicopters and Sudanese military Antonovs circled the village," she said. Later, four men wearing Sudanese military uniforms entered her house and took all her property, then set the house on fire.
"My husband had fled first for fear that he might be killed," she continued, describing what appears to be a common pattern among Darfurian villagers attacked over the last several months. As the men in the village get wind of impending attacks, they flee at once – knowing that they will be killed if they stay – leaving the women and children behind. The male villagers know that the women will be raped, but probably not killed. That is, unless they resist.
Of the 300 families from this village, about 25 people were killed and about 15 wounded. Azine's sister ran away from the attackers and was shot and killed, along with her 3-year-old daughter.
Since early 2003, tens of thousands of Sudanese citizens of African descent who live in the Darfur region have been systematically killed, raped, and displaced as their villages have been destroyed. Through coordinated land and air attacks; the burning of homes and crops; the rounding up of livestock; the destruction of wells, granaries, and irrigation works; the uprooting of trees; and the theft of all possessions, the government of Sudan and the government-supported Arab militia, Janjaweed, have displaced more than 1 million people.
Thousands are now wandering the drought-stricken, barren landscape, while tens of thousands are reportedly being held in prison enclaves in cities and villages throughout Darfur. An additional 200,000 Darfurians have crossed the eastern border of Sudan, seeking refuge in Chad, as Azine did after her village was destroyed.
For several months, experts from humanitarian and human-rights groups and the United Nations have predicted that tens of thousands of internally displaced persons in Sudan will die unless they receive major international humanitarian support. According to some reports, the early stages of those grim predictions have already been realized.
In May 2004, as part of a Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) emergency investigation, in partnership with the Open Society Institute's Justice Initiative, I arrived in this region along the Chadian-Sudanese border to assess human-rights and humanitarian law violations of the Darfur civilians and the risk of morbidity and mortality among the refugees driven from their homes in that region.
Jennifer Leaning, a physician who teaches a course in humanitarian emergencies, and I spent two weeks traveling extensively throughout eastern Chad. We traversed several thousand kilometers in order to assess the situation and to conduct interviews with refugees in camps and in other places along the Chadian-Sudanese border. We wanted to gather testimony from refugees who came from different parts of Darfur about the timing, nature, and targets of the attacks, to collect information on the attacking forces and the way they pursued villagers and local Sudanese to the border of Chad.
We recorded dozens of refugee testimonies that indigenous African civilians – primarily from the Fur, Masilit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups – are being targeted by the Sudanese government and its Arab-Janjaweed militia because of their ethnicity. There is ample evidence to indicate that an organized campaign on the part of the Sudanese government is under way, targeting several million people from this region of the country either by killing them or forcing them to migrate. Without an immediate and concerted international intervention, a substantial part of the targeted group may be eliminated. Current predictions from governmental and nongovernmental sources suggest that the toll could be between 300,000 and 1 million if a robust intervention does not occur.
PHR is calling the forcible removal of black African Darfurians from their land, the total destruction of villages and livelihood, and the deliberate obstruction of aid indicators of genocide that warrant immediate intervention. An intervention, ideally backed by a UN Security Council resolution – which supports the protection of humanitarian supply lines, disarms the militia groups, ensures the cessation of violence and a withdrawal of Sudanese government forces in Darfur, allows for the safe return of internally displaced persons and refugees to their land, and provides human-rights monitors – is necessary. Simultaneously, PHR calls on the United States to ramp up its humanitarian assistance and to impose targeted sanctions on Sudanese government officials (including freezing assets and access to U.S. capital markets). In addition, PHR is discovering signs of genocide that may put international agencies and other countries under an obligation to act to prevent and punish the perpetrators.
The Bush administration has been a leading force on the UN Security Council on matters concerning Darfur, but it has not determined that genocide has taken place. In addition, the Bush administration has been unwilling to push for a UN resolution seeking an intervention.
The administration should take a harder position with the Khartoum government, including support for a UN Security Council resolution that calls for intervention under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Its current approach may be the result of the administration's concern about jeopardizing the long-awaited peace-signing process that would end the decades-long war between the Arab north and the Christian south. Talks between the Sudanese government and rebels from the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) will soon take place in Naivasha, Kenya, focusing on security and a permanent ceasefire – as well as possible autonomy for the South. Moreover, the Iraq conflict may have taken its toll on U.S. diplomatic efforts elsewhere.
Without a more robust response to the crisis in Darfur, thousands will perish inside Sudan and refugees like Azine will continue to languish in refugee camps with little hope of returning home anytime soon. What's at stake here is enormous and clear: a moral obligation by the United States and the international community to prevent another genocide from occurring under their watch.
Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: John Heffernan, "Another Problem From Hell", The American Prospect Online, Jun 30, 2004. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.
John Heffernan, who has worked in Khartoum, Sudan, documenting persecution stories of Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees, is a senior communications associate for Physicians for Human Rights. He lives in Washington, D.C