No Refuge For Sudanese Refugees

I'm nearly finished reading Sheryl Wudunn's and Nicholas Kristof's "Half The Sky." To say that it's having a profound affect on me would be an understatement. But I'll save that for another post for when I'm done. For now, I'll just say that any news involving female oppression in the developing world has gone up tremendously on my news radar. So it should come as no suprise that this article, regarding Sudanese women who continue to be raped and victimized in their supposed refugee camps, has caught my eye. In particular, this quote from the deputy director of Amnesty International's Africa program is difficult to grasp:

"What people don't realize is that there is little safety inside the camps for these same women," said Hondora in a statement. "They face the risk of rape and other violence at the hands of family members, other refugees, and staff of humanitarian organizations, whose task it is to provide them with assistance and support."

Unfortunately there have been too many times in the past where I would have read this and thought, "Wow what a fucked up situation it is there. Wish I had time and/or money to help." Now I'm asking questions like, "To what extent is there little safety? Why is rape being inflicted by family members and fellow refugees, and how widespread is it? Which humanitarian organizations are these, and where do they get their staff? Is there truly no escape for these women and girls, or are there at least some ways to improve there lives?" Most importantly, I'm thinking of this incredibly complex conflict from a much more critical and analytical approach than I ever have. A person like me, who knows next to nothing about rape and female oppression throughout the world, is thinking of paths toward potential solutions or at least toward the alleviation of the conflict. That is the real beauty of Wudunn's and Kristof's book. It's an inspiration and a call to arms. It's safe to say that I recommend it.

Malaysian Woman Sentenced To Caning

For being an alcohol drinking female Muslim.

Foreign Policy Shift

When I took a quick scan of the front page of the New York Times today, I was informed by the paper's Peter Baker that Obama's foreign policy is really not all that different from George Bush's. He starts out with the example that Hillary Clinton recently tied our responsibility and appetite for drugs to the related conflict in Mexico.

The remarks were interpreted as a departure from the previous administration, another sign of a new day in foreign policy under Mr. Obama. Forgotten in the discussion was the fact that President George W. Bush said virtually the same thing in Mexico two years ago. “The United States has a responsibility in the fight against drugs,” he said, because “when there is demand, there is supply.”

He then points out that Obama will bring to Mexico "the same American interests as his predecessor, even if they are wrapped in a different package." Further evidence of the Obama/Bush brotherhood lies in the fact that Obama favors "the same six-party talks begun under Mr. Bush in 2003, intended to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons." With regard to Iraq, Obama is of course in line with W. because his plan allows 50,000 troops to remain as of August of 2010, and Bush "signed an agreement with Baghdad before leaving office to remove all American troops by the end of 2011." Obama's Afghanistan troop buildup? According to Baker, since his predecessor had begun a "more modest buildup" and since there is broad bipartisan support for such a thing, this is indication of more Bush (because we all think of bipartisanship when we think of Bush).

Baker does point out two differences at the end: Obama's unwillingness to talk about spreading freedom worldwide in the same way that Bush did, and his willingness to engage diplomatically with so-called enemies. Of course, in painting Obama's foreign policy as the same as Bush's foreign policy with just these two exceptions is incredibly misleading.

The gotcha at the beginning of the article - Clinton's drug remarks being remarkably the same as Bush's - is hardly a gotcha. That the Bush administration and the Obama administration are both probably in favor of reducing drug abuse in this country could have been predicted by just about any educated person. It's the approach where we may find significant differences. Indeed, the Obama administration has signaled that that "it was ready to repudiate the prohibition and 'war on drugs' approach of previous presidents, and steer policy towards prevention and "harm reduction" strategies favoured by Europe.' This is a big change! Regarding North Korea, Baker alludes to Bush's failed first-term approach in a half-assed way toward the end of the article. But this fails to underscore the big difference here - that Obama wants a multilateral approach from the beginning, while Bush steered clear of such an approach toward the beginning of his administration. It took him until his second term to realize how destructive the anti-diplomacy road can be. With Iraq, the huge difference is that Bush began an idiotic preemptive war. Just because he had an approach toward the end of his second term that is sort of similar to Obama's now doesn't erase this massive blunder, which contrasts their foreign policy (thus far) immensely.

It's difficult for me to believe that any educated person would take such an article seriously, let alone write such an article. Which leads me to believe that Baker is intentionally misleading his readers.

The Magic Negro

I don't know why these things still surprise me, but they really still do. A candidate for the RNC Chairman position has distributed a music CD which includes a song called, "Barack the Magic Negro." As far as I can tell, this has gone largely unnoticed. Not that there aren't more important things going on in the world, but as citizens we don't have as much direct power in controlling those other more import things. Take what's happened in the Middle East these last couple of days. It's terrible, and we should be paying a whole of attention to what is happening and how our government responds. But it would take a tremendous amount of effort to influence our government to putting pressure on the peace process. In contrast, it would take either the media to give more attention to this clown of a candidate, or us as citizens to dig beyond the front pages of our news, or both, to filter him out of power. This is someone with potentially a significant amount of political power, and he shouldn't be entitled to gain any more. When Trent Lott gestured a few years back that we would have been better off if Strom Thurmond had won the presidency (the guy who ran on a segregationist platform) half a century or so ago, the blogs and subsequently the media payed attention. As a result, he might have retained power, but at least he lost his role as majority leader. Something similar should happen with this guy.

Free Societies

Is he really encouraging shoe-throwing as a way to gain attention for one's cause?

Cholera in Zimbabwe

Having seen some crazy news stories out of Zimbabwe, I decided to wikipedia the country and came away thoroughly fascinated by the brief history I read. I didn't realize, for instance, that it has a 90% literacy rate, good for one of the highest rates in the world. I also didn't realize, however, that the power-hungry Mugabe and his government are responsible for having created a sort of living hell for the people of Zimbabwe, with the help of a number of his policies. One result is that cholera cases have recently jumped, and the WHO says 60,000 people could be infected in the weeks to come.

Surge Myth

It has become conventional wisdom that the surge strategy in Iraq has largely been a success. Even Obama has admitted unforeseen progress that has come of the strategy. But he has also not conceded error in his opposition the surge in the first place, and rightly so. I've always thought that it has been a marginal success because it hasn't achieved political reconciliation. At www.icasualties.org, you can see that US and Iraqi deaths are consistently now a fraction of what it was before the surge. But it's not a tiny fraction. It's maybe one-fourth or one-fifth of pre-surge levels. That's still a significant death rate. And now the New York Times reports that according "to the latest data from the military command in Baghdad, violence in Iraq has been rolled back to the levels of early 2004." Who knows what the answer is to the mess we made over there? Our military presence might be a cork on a bottle of chaos, but that is no strategy of getting at the root of the violence. That's why the success of the surge has always been somewhat of a myth.