Constant Rape in Chad and Darfur Sunday, May 31 2009
warfare 7:27 pm
A new Harvard-back study found that Darfuri women at refugee camps in Chad and Darfur are frequently being raped. Big surprise. Here’s how it works: you go to get firewood, and you get raped.
Like Joe Biden, I believe that there needs to be a military force in the region to put a stop to the genocide and rape. So far, only about 9,000 African Union and U.N. peacekeepers have been deployed in Darfur to protect and provide relief for 2.5 million civilians. This is not nearly enough. When hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children civilians are being murdered, tortured, and raped, it is humanity’s business. There needs to be a much larger military coalition, made up of all willing nations.
The Janjaweed are relatively small in number, just 20,000 by some estimates, and with primitive technology. They are essentially bandits with AK-47s on horseback, highly susceptible to missiles or machine gun fire from aircraft. The Sudanese government declines that it is supporting the group. Sudan has been openly complicit in massacres and slave-taking in Southern Sudan, however.
The peacekeeping force might have a problem if the military of Sudan intervened. They number about 400,000, with 100,000 reserve, and “the most advanced military production industry in Africa and the Middle East.” Still, I think it’s worth being bold and seeing what happens. If Sudan cannot defend its inhabitants from genocide, it has temporarily sacrificed its right to govern. The concept of Westphalian sovereignty ought to be suspended in this instance, under extenuating circumstances.
According to DarfurScores.org, Sally Chin of Refugees International has noted, the world has given the African Union “the responsibility to protect, but not the power to protect.” It must be given the power to protect. World leaders (nudged along by the world academic/intellectual complex) should take the necessary actions to see this happen. We have the power. The United States can lead, but it might be difficult to do alone, occupied as we are by Iraq and Afghanistan.
Perhaps we never should have invaded Iraq, and instead spent all our resources on Darfur and Afghanistan.
If US leadership is politically untenable, then other nations need to step forward. You can’t just let genocide happen and do nothing about it — that is ridiculous. At the very least, everyone could complain about it more.
Here is a letter from a Sudanese thinker who believes that intervention would only make things worse. If so, then the primary focus should be on encouraging the rebels and Sudanese government into peace negotiations. Whatever strategy is chosen, the point is to do something to try and stop the genocide. The blogger asserts that water shortages are one of the root causes of the conflict — if so, then better nanotechnology research into water filters and a humanitarian campaign to ship these to the region might do more in the long run than a UN intervention.
You americans, always looking for some excuse to colonise.
so people criticize your unsubstantiated claim about world government and you respond with pathos. sad to see from a futurist.
In my opinion the religious dimension of the Darfur crisis is often overlooked. I see it merely as a religious progrom. Conducted by muslims against the christian non-muslim population.
Come on wake up! Darfur is just another scene on the islamic way to world domination. The power of Islam is ever and ever increasing in our days. Unfortunately in western countries, too. This is partly due to demographic reasons, since the immegrated muslim population has a higher reproduction rate. Another is that the political class and academia in the west is notoriously ignorant of islam’s totalitarian nature.
Islam is for sure opposed to libertarian ideas and therefore we as transhumanists should have a watchful eye on it.
I must say that I am greatly dismayed to read this post. There are so many troubling aspects to it.
Let’s get the biggest one out of the way first: the idea of a worldwide police force, invariably with America as its captain, is utterly incompatible with reality (and dreadfully naive). Nobody starts wars (or peacekeeping missions – read: never ending occupation) for strategically worthless land, especially in aid of *worthless* civilians (black African women no less – you’d be hard pressed to find a group of people *less* valued in the world).
Additionally, considering the effect that American peacekeeping has had on Iraq, I’d think the very *last* think those poor people need is American *help*.
Africa isn’t anyone’s *job* to fix – the only way there will ever be order in Africa, let alone peace, is if Africans make it themselves. Nothing else is going to work.
Of course, the cynic in me thinks that the governments most likely to intervene in this case are also the ones with the most to gain from keeping Africa destabilised. When has peacekeeping *ever* resulted in real peace? Keep them divided and they’ll never be a threat.
The reason to do this just doesn’t exist really. You’d just be pissing off China, the middle east some more and gain nothing.
Not to mention the US is trying to focus on Afghanistan at the moment; and while money is easy to come by for the military managing troops and their tours is more troublesome.
Michael, those 9,000 troops would be plenty enough to do the job — if they were allowed to do anything more than simply observe.
Do you know anything about how the UN and African Union peacekeepers were deployed to the region? They are strictly forbidden from entering into engagements unless they themselves are directly fired upon.
More such troops would have exactly the same effect as they already are: jack diddly.
This is a case where more information might make a change… but that’s not the information that’s being provided here. Ahh, well.
@Everyone & Michael
All reasons why a Friendly Artificial Intelligence could/should be the benevolent singleton to finally bring about perpetual world peace and justice. A Friendly Artificial Intelligence wouldn’t care about the price of it’s oil stock in joint Sudanese and Chinese petroleum corporations or the political fallout that angering China’s interests in the region would bring. An unmanned autonomous peacemaking force under the leadership of an infinitely wiser and more humanitarian Artificial Intelligence could pacify the region while securing the shipment of much needed aid without the selfish interference of greedy and emotionally volatile humans with their misguided interest in profit and religious opportunism.
Nai,
Not interested in colonizing, just stopping mass rape and families being killed in front of each other. If USA doesn’t do it, someone has to.
Stuart,
Not incompatible with reality, it already happened in Bosnia and other places.
If it’s so naive, then why is Biden in favor of it?
What about Bosnia? We ought to start caring about African women more, perhaps.
Then, every country in the world besides America. Why is Europe perfectly alright with people being mass raped? At least complain more intensely.
But “Africans” aren’t a unified whole. Everyone has a stake in what happens there. If someone is being killed or raped, it doesn’t matter what continent it’s on — if it’s at all practical to stop, it has to be stopped.
Dom,
Preventing rape and genocide isn’t a reason?
Michael is right once again. Michael has heart, once again.
But nobody will help those people, until we have the Singleton or something like that. Nobody.
Michael: “You can’t just let genocide happen and do nothing about it — that is ridiculous”
just watch us!
I remember in high school watching the news and seeing video of dead U.S soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia.
I remember thinking at the time that none of those soldier’s lives were worth the attempt to save that dysfunctional country.
And yet we still have interventionists who want to repeat the same mistakes by sending Western troops to another third world cesspool.
Will we never learn?
“Preventing rape and genocide isn’t a reason?”
If that’s what Obama and Biden want to do then I’m all for it; they can go in guns blazing and i’ll watch the show on liveleak. The problem is doing something like this causes more problems than it solves; if we’re going to be brutally honest people are pretty expendable and what motivation is there for the government to save all these people? Their gratitude? Can’t buy bombs with gratitude.
Like I said before the US has other priorities elsewhere and it would essentially be earning the ire of the Chinese and Sudanese whilst pleasing some people on the left; who are already in love with Obama anyway.
One of the many reasons to work for the Singularity, to wake up in the morning with the singular purpose of putting an end to the horror.
We have a world where bad things happen for bad reasons – entirely natural reasons. Conventional attempts at fixing it, by force, aid, and education, provably don’t work. They are palliative at best – when the cure has been administered, the disease will reappear. The reasons are built into the system – the primitive, simple life close to the natural state, with nothing to live for, just what you can get your hands on next. Evolution built into us the responses that are responsible for the mess. We must fix the problem on much deeper level. All this will go on until the Singularity.
So, since apparently no states wish to intervene. What if a few tech gazillionaires hired an army of private military contractors to deal with the Janjaweed. We’ll have an awful lot of contractors/veterans from Blackwater, Aegis, Dyncorp, and Triple Canopy out of work by the time Iraq is finished next month and when Afghanistan is done in two years. Why not use them for the greater good? True, there are international laws that prohibit offensive mercenary actions such as by Executive Outcomes several years ago, but maybe we should consider reevaluating these, given the misery in Africa at present. Obviously, there are many ways this could turn sour. But perhaps it’s worth consideration…