The Daily Background

AP:

The U.N. said [recently] that the May 5 peace deal, signed between Sudan’s government and Darfur’s main rebel group, was “doomed to failure” unless the government provided more support.

“It’s going from real bad to catastrophic in Darfur,” Jan Egeland told reporters at the U.N.’s European headquarters in Geneva.

Fighting has actually increased since the peace deal, “and it has been particularly terrible among (rebel) factions fighting each other,” Egeland said. “That’s led to tens of thousands of people being displaced, and sexual abuse and many other types of violations.”

The Associated Press then went on to say that more than 200,000 civilians have died since 2003 when the conflict began. For some reason they don’t say that the number is actually estimated by most to be closer to 400,000 people.

The international community, including the United States, has failed wholly to respond to the situation in a responsible manner.

Because the United Nations refuses to declare the situation a genocide, it is not compelled to act under its charter. Although in May of this year the UN unanimously agreed to send a peacekeeping force into the area to stop the ethnically-motivated atrocities, it’s now August and no UN troops have entered Sudan yet. A large reason why this hasn’t happened is because American soldiers, which comprise by far the largest bloc of UN forces, are all bogged down in Iraq.

Recent reports have actually stated that the U.S. in fact had literally no strategic reserve left to deploy, and wouldn’t be any available to deploy if the U.S. was attacked by another country. And if we don’t have enough free resources to deploy troops if attacked, we certainly don’t have enough to deploy to protect people living in Africa.

Iraq and Darfur are inexorably linked. It’s because of this horrible war that the United States is not able to respond responsibly to humanitarian crises.

Filed under: Darfur Related, Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog