Posted on 07/21/2003 12:41:58 PM PDT by Trueblackman
Sharpton: African Americans should help decide whether United States sends peacekeepers to Liberia
By EDWARD HARRIS The Associated Press 7/20/03 4:21 PM
ACCRA, Ghana (AP) -- Black Americans should help U.S. officials decide whether or not to send peacekeeping troops to Liberia, Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton said Sunday in Ghana -- where negotiators are working on a peace plan despite fresh fighting in the war-torn West African nation founded by freed American slaves.
U.S. President George W. Bush is considering whether to send troops to bolster a promised West African force that Liberians hope will end more than a decade of fighting in the country.
"The African American community can have a lot of impact on what position will come from the U.S. government based on where we want to go and recommend," said Sharpton, a civil rights leader who plans to run in the 2004 U.S. presidential elections.
Sharpton is leading a delegation of prominent black Americans, including Princeton African-American studies scholar Cornel West, to Ghana's capital, where Liberian peace talks are being held.
The group hopes to travel to Liberia to meet with embattled President Charles Taylor although the fighting has become increasingly fierce in recent days with a rebel push into the capital.
"The carnage must stop," Sharpton said.
Sharpton told The Associated Press after meeting with rebel and government delegates he had yet to decide whether he thought the United States should commit troops to the country.
"America should do whatever it can in conjunction with African leaders. What that should be, we'll make that determination after the talks," with other delegates and possibly Taylor, Sharpton said.
Bush has made Taylor's departure a precondition for sending troops. Taylor, a former warlord and indicted war criminal has accepted a Nigerian offer of sanctuary but said he would only leave when what he described as a "sufficient" number of peacekeepers were on the ground.
The west African regional bloc meditating peace efforts in Ghana has promised to send 1,500 peacekeeping troops in the coming weeks to monitor a June 17 cease-fire agreement between forces loyal to Taylor and rebels seeking his ouster.
The United States -- under international pressure to send forces to Liberia -- has indicated it won't make a decision until west African troops are on the ground and the situation can be better assessed.
Monrovia has become overrun with thousands of refugees who have fled three recent attacks on the city. Aid workers are warning of a humanitarian disaster as food stores dwindle and disease festers amid heavy fighting in parts of the city.
Sharpton said his delegation's mission is humanitarian in nature, but he would try and help ease along the peace negotiations that began on June 4 -- the day a U.N.-backed court in nearby Sierra Leone indicted Taylor on war crimes for his role in supporting a rebel group's terror campaign in that country.
Sharpton said he wouldn't choose sides in the conflict, which has raged since insurgents took up arms against Taylor in 1999, adding "wherever we can help the peace process, we will."
"The side that doesn't want to see the continual murders and pain and starvation in Liberia is the side that will ultimately win the trust of the people," Sharpton said.
Taylor, a former warlord elected president in 1997, launched Liberia's unrest in 1989 with his own insurgency.
Sharpton was also accompanied by the Rev. Al Sampson of Chicago; attorney Lewis Meyers; and Akbar Muhammad, Islam expert and Africana studies professor at New York's Binghamton University.
Bump!
I'd be a close race. They're both stupid and racist.
LOL! Good one!
I guess he doesn't agree with Charlie Rangel?
February 5, 2003
Bill Asks Equality If Draft is Needed
Washington Post
Two House Democrats introduced legislation last month to bring back the military draft, causing experts nationwide to debate whether or not minorities are disproportionately represented and killed while serving in the armed forces. “They tell you that the military is voluntary, but that concept for blacks and poor whites is like a rat being dropped in a maze,” says (University of Maryland) Academy Senior Scholar Ron Walters. “The playing field outside the military is not level. Life structures you into certain choices, and you wind up in the military.”
Doesn't matter what they are.
The point is American volunteers can get their butts over there any time they want.
This is the key point. Pres. Bush has taken sides, and I presume Sharpton is loath to be on the same side. So instead he talks about sending peacekeepers. I guess we do too, but the problem is that:
a. There is no peace to keep
b. The existing leadership is the problem
Should we be the solution and overthrow the existing government? I'm unsure, but lean towards yes if and only if the best intelligence indicates that the task will be easy and that we can quickly exit afterwards.
As to whether it is our responsibility, it is true that the US founded Liberia, but that was an awful long time ago. So we don't have as much responsibility as, for example, the French have in Ivory Coast. Tough call.
This may or may not be the point of Score's post, but Jackson bears great responsibility for the human rights disaster in several West African nations, including Liberia, due to his disgraceful, but US government-authorized, Clinton-era diplomacy:
Who does? The only question left is...which one is a bigger moron?
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