Giving new urgency to the rising public outcry against the Darfur genocide, the UN's World Food Program has been forced to halve the food rations for 6.1 million Sudanese whose ability to provide for themselves has been disrupted by civil war and displacement.
Donor states have simply not given enough aid to maintain the humanitarian effort, and the program has been forced to cut the food ration per person by 50%, from 2,100 calories/day to 1,050 calories/day. With other international aid agencies being driven from the region as a result of escalating violence, UN officials have estimated that as many as 100,000 people a month may die of starvation.
An attempt by the African Union to moderate an end to violence was set back significantly today, as the two major factions opposing the Khartoum regime rejected a proposal which the Sudanese government endorsed earlier in the day. The rebel groups objected that the agreement would not sufficiently address the immediate security and humanitarian issues.
With UN peacekeeping operations unlikely to occur without the permission of the Khartoum government, and Russia and China scuttling Security Council efforts to apply even minimal sanctions on the regime, the U.S. and Britain, among other countries, have begun considering NATO intervention. China relies on Sudanese oil, and provides arms to the government.
On the reduction of refugee rations, James Morris, director of the World Food Program, said, "This is one of the hardest decisions I have ever made. Haven't the people of Darfur suffered enough?"
Earlier today, the UN Security Council passed sanctions on four Sudanese men accused of war crimes in connection with the genocide in Darfur, freezing their assets and instructing nations to block their entry.
This is the first move of any impact the UN has made in response to Darfur, and it is long past due and woefully underwhelming. At the very least, the UN should provide support for the undermanned and under-resourced African Union which is attempting to intercede in the conflict. Ideally, the UN should commit a peacekeeping force to the region (despite the protestations of the Sudanese government), and not tie their own hands behind their back, as was done in Rwanda twelve years ago.
If the international community is serious about preventing agreggious human rights violations, the Security Council must take action to stamp out the murder of thousands of innocent people. This concern ought to take priority over fighting terrorism, which is, simply put, less impactful globally, in terms of loss of life, than the genocide in Sudan or any other state-sponsored attack on civilians occuring in the world today.
In taking a strong stance on the protection of human rights, and in a larger role, working to eliminate extreme poverty from the globe, the international apparatus of the UN and it's partner organizations will also indirectly address terrorism by minimizing the socio-economic struggles which lead many to sympathize with terrorists, and completely delegitimize terrorism as an instrument of social change.
If you missed the White House press conference on Friday, you missed a beautiful thing. Last week, Scooter Libby, former chief aide to Dick Cheney, revealed in grand jury testimony that President Bush himself authorized Cheney to authorize Libby to disseminate classified information, namely the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
As soon as the testimony hit the news, the press was abuzz, and by Friday afternoon, they gleefully tore into Press Secretary Scot McClellan with fangs bared. For his part, McClellan put on a brave face and attempted to deflect the blows with "It is the policy of this administration not to comment on an ongoing investigation," and "You have to draw a distinction," apparently, between the sort of leaking that threatens national security (which the Plame leak did), and the sort of leaking that is purely political but it's ok because the president said so.
On the subject of distinctions, however, McClellan conspicuously ignored the distinction between the president formally and publicly declassifying records he feels are in the public interest to disseminate, and sneakily instructing lower level staffers to whisper cherry picked pieces of intelligence to favored reporters, then denying any White House connection to the leak and promising to prosecute anyone connected to it.
Well, now Mr. Bush is connected to it, and while declassifying information is, for him at least, not a crime, there is some uncertainty as to whether the proper procedure was followed, and whether revealing the information was truly in the public interest. Given that revealing Plame's identity publicly created threats to her life and those of her contacts, and destroyed one hard-earned undercover intelligence post, thereby potentially weakening national security, and given that the only possible benefit to the public of knowing this information would be the discreditation of Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, whose information about Iraq's nuclear ambitions turned out to be spot on (thus making the leak more of a public detriment than a benefit), this will be a hard case for the White House to argue.
The plain fact is that the White House intentionally exposed Valerie Plame, either in an attempt to discredit her husband, or as an act of revenge for her husband's column on Iraq's supposed attempts to obtain uranium, and subsequently attempted to distance itself from the whole affair.
While the White House can usually argue (with some plausability for the only partially engaged) that their policies are designed with the best intentions for the public in mind, this case lays bare that President Bush and the White house are simply more concerned about self-preservation, political gain, and revenge than they are about national security.
At 36% approval and falling, the country may just be coming, finally, to the same conclusion.
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