Failure looms in Darfur

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=195012 ^

[zendari]

Three years after the United States accused Sudan of committing genocide in Darfur and a full year after the United Nations began pushing to deploy its own peacekeeping force there, the conflict remains one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

There will be only about 6,500 UN peacekeepers in Darfur 10 days from now, when a new joint UN-African Union force (UNAMID) is scheduled to take over in western Sudan.

That's barely a quarter of the promised force of 26,000 peacekeepers who were supposed to replace 7,000 under-equipped, dejected and ineffective African Union troops who have been struggling to stop a conflict that has raged for nearly five years.

Before the UN even sets foot in Darfur, critics are predicting the mission could become the world's biggest peacekeeping failure.

[zendari]

Apparently the French can't come up with 24 helicopters.

The UN is a complete joke. Wonder when the Dimocrats will scream about Bush.

[Doctor Raoul]

How about all the a-hole liberals that always scream about the lack of UN mandate or aproval?

Worthless bastards.

[RightWhale]

The ‘Arabs’ of Darfur continue unopposed.

[ARE SOLE]

But at least we had good intentions ....

Regards.

[flowerplough]

Failure looms in Darfur, and, to varying degrees and on separate schedules, in most of Africa, and in the slums of many American cities, I'm afraid.

From a review of Keith Richburg's "Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa"

...African leaders confide in Richburg because he is black. Zaire's communications minister allows how the disintegration of his nation's economy is a grand conspiracy of the white West. A Sudanese leader explains that there is a British plot to keep his country from too much independence, and he equates this with the condition of blacks in America. Richburg, in turn, can compare these with the sorts of conspiracy theories, widespread among African-Americans in Washington, that "they" are out to eliminate the black man. Over and over again, Richburg's journalistic sense of reality has to reject identification with Africa, and also with many aspects of white and black America.

Richburg was a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, wrote his book in 1997.

[kcar]

Meanwhile, the UN has been off hosting a Global Warming convention in exotic Bali and trying to figure out a way to create a UN tax from a warming trend that began after the last ice age ended.

[Dog Gone]

Before the UN even sets foot in Darfur, critics are predicting the mission could become the world's biggest peacekeeping failure.

That's fairly unlikely. Rwanda comes to mind. Nevertheless, there's an easy solution to this. U-Hauls. How much furniture is in those huts, anyway?

You probably can load up 10 families in one small trailer, although you might have a passenger problem.

I have sympathy for those being oppressed, but this simply is not an area of strategic interest to the US.

If we want to make a difference in the world, a couple of the most oppressive countries are Cuba and Venezuela, and we do have a strategic interest there.

[ken21]

so so so sorry!