Sudan: The Passion of the Present
"In Darfur, a region in western Sudan approximately the size of Texas, over a million people are threatened with torture and death at the hands of marauding militia and a complicit government. Genocide evokes not only the moral, but also, the legal responsibility of the world community. Under international agreement, a nation must intervene to stop a genocide when it is officially acknowledged." Compelling words there from The Passion of the Present, a blog devoted to helping raise awareness of the suffering in Sudan. The posts are informative and the links are useful.
One of the links, leads to eXile, a bi-weekly free newspaper published in English, based in Moscow and run by American journalist Mark Ames. The eXile's "War Nerd", Gary Brecher, presents his own take on Sudan in "Darfur: A Whole New Hell". You may think that humour has no place in such a deadly serious matter, but you don't know Brecher. He is far more effective with his barbs of searing honesty than any NGO flack churning our lame press releases. Listen to this:
"Darfur" means "Fur-Land." The Fur are a black tribe who manage to scrape out a living in the dry scrub at the edge of the Sahara in Western Sudan. If you live in a place like Fresno, where there's always a drought, or there's just been a drought, you can get some idea of what that means, but I always wonder if you people in the East, or in Europe, have a feel for drought. You get so much rain you're spoiled. You even complain about it.Well, in Sudan there's never enough rain. The only water is the Nile, and the Arabs grabbed all the river frontage. Which means the Fur have to farm a desert. I drive to work along dry scrubland, and try to imagine what it'd be like to grow millet or corn on it. The adobe in Bakersfield, where I grew up, gets hard as concrete in the summer. We always tried to dig forts and trenches, and we never could because you had to soak the ground with a hose for an hour before you could take a shovel to it at all.
No hoses in Darfur — you lug in every bucket of water by hand, with an AK on your back in case anybody else gets possessive about the well, or spring, or whatever miserable hole you get your stinking, muddy water from. You have to sleep in the fields to keep people from stealing your birdseed (cause that's what millet is), praying to Allah that the locusts don't drop in for a little fast food. Drag yourself home when it's dark, beat your wife for a little stress relief, fall asleep listening to your favorite kid coughing up its lungs, then get up at dawn and do it all again.
Sudan. It's hell on earth.
