Author: Mick Hartley

ading their terror tactics to southern Sudan. Now the regional government has met with the LRA leadership – including chief psycho Joseph Kony – and handed over cash in what appears to be a foolish attempt to buy them off:

The new regional government of Southern Sudan has ignored the International Criminal Court’s warrants for the arrest of four top Ugandan rebel leaders, Human Rights Watch said today. The regional government, which acknowledges that the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has committed grave abuses, has an obligation to help bring its leaders to justice.

On May 2, representatives of the Southern Sudan government met in southern Sudan with LRA leader Joseph Kony and his second-in-command, Vincent Otti, who are subjects of arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court. In a digital recording of the meeting made by the Sudanese participants, Dr. Riek Machar Teny Dhurgon, vice-president of the regional government, can be seen handing over bundles of cash to Kony. On the recording, the vice-president is heard cautioning Kony not to use the money for ammunition.

“Southern Sudan’s leaders should arrest people accused of horrific war crimes, not give them food and money,” said Jemera Rone, East Africa coordinator at Human Rights Watch.

The LRA began its war to topple Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni in 1986. The rebels, based in northern Uganda, struck fear in the civilian population by carrying out mutilations, killings and forced recruitment of child soldiers mostly from the Acholi people of northern Uganda. In December 2003, Museveni invited the International Criminal Court to investigate the LRA. On October 14, 2005 the court issued warrants for the arrest of the top five LRA leaders: Kony and Otti, who attended the May 2 meeting; and Okot Odhiambo, Raska Lukwiya and Dominic Ongwen (deceased). They are accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes. […]

Riek Machar told Human Rights Watch that the ICC represented “European justice,” ignoring the fact that Museveni had invited the ICC to Uganda. The vice-president, citing Southern Sudan’s multiple challenges of establishing a new democracy in a long-neglected and war-torn area, said his fledgling government could not be the “police of the world.”

More reporting on the LRA here, and here, plus of course the invaluable Wikipedia.

Scientists believe they’ve solved the mystery of the Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago:

Scientists have located a massive crater under the Antarctic ice that they believe gave rise to the evolution of dinosaurs.
The 300-mile (480km) wide crater is thought to have been created by a meteor almost as big as London. It dates back 250 million years to the time of the biggest mass extinction in Earth’s history and the event that led to the first dinosaurs evolving.

Such was the catastrophic nature of the extinction that up to 96 per cent of all marine creatures were killed and 70 per cent of land animals. The strike may also have been powerful enough to have begun the break-up of the Gondwana supercontinent, which resulted in Australia sheering off and drifting northwards.

Researchers in the United States located the crater more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet at Wilkes Land, using gravity measurements from satellites and radar images from aircraft. They calculated that it would take a meteor 30 miles wide to have caused such a crater. By comparison, the meteor held to have ended the dinosaur era and created the Chicxulub crater, in Mexico, would have been six miles across.

More here.

0s the Garden of Eden was destroyed. The fertile wetlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were diked and drained, turning most of 15,000 square kilometers of marsh to desert. By the year 2000, less than 10 percent of that swampland–nearly twice as big as Florida’s Everglades–remained. But reflooding of some areas since 2003 has produced what some scientists are calling the “miracle of the Mesopotamian marshes”–a return of plants, aquatic life and even rare birds to their ancestral home.

Curtis Richardson of Duke University and Najah Hussain of the University of Basra in Iraq have conducted the first ecological survey of the restored marshes. By September of last year, 39 percent of the original marshland was again underwater according to satellite photos. The natural rivers of grass had returned to these fragmented marshes and the scientists chose four to monitor: Al-Hawizeh (the only remaining natural marsh), Al-Hammar, Abu Zarag and Suq Al-Shuyukh. They found that by a host of measures, ranging from water quality to wildlife the marshes were returning to health.

Helped by increased snowmelt from the mountains of bordering Turkey and Iran, the reflooded marshes avoided high levels of toxins, heavy metals and other releases from the dry soil. As a result, vegetation is expanding to cover an additional 800 square kilometers per year. With vegetation, fish, crustaceans and other water creatures have returned, though not to historic levels. And bird species not seen in decades–such as the highly threatened Iraq babbler–have reappeared, part of a total of 74 returned birds.

“By medicalising it, we will be endorsing this practice, this violation of a child’s body and a basic human right of an individual and I think that’s the worst thing we can possibly do,” Joy Phumaphi, WHO assistant director-general for family and community health, told the BBC. […]

FGM is practised in 28 countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.

One hundred million women worldwide have undergone the procedure, which happens to three million girls under 10 every year.

The Daily NK (via The Korea Liberator) report on food shortages in North Korea, with many signs suggesting a repeat of the mass famine of the 90s:

North Korea is facing the hardest “yellow spring” right now. ‘Yellow Spring’ means the hardest time of the year in North Korea. “Yellow spring” originates from how the sky looks yellow because of starvation.

Mr. Lee Hyun Soo (46) who crossed the Tumen River on 15 May said, “It is hard to endure day by day”.

Mr. Lee, head of a household of four said, “Rumors of people going to China and South Korea go around. I tried not to cross the border, but I did because of my family members who are starving”. He complained, “The government have been acting like they would give us food for a long time, but they deceived us”.

Recently, North Koreans who cannot make their ends meet like Mr. Lee started to cross the Tumen River again. The reporter met 5 North Koreans including Mr. Lee. They met with the reporter at a secret place in Yanji, and expressed strong discontents about the situation of food shortage in North Korea and the policy regarding food distribution system.

Mr. Choi Young Nam (37) said, “I have been waiting since the 1st of April. I know that there are even less rice in spring, so where would the rice come from? They cannot deceive us like this”. Mr. Choi said. “In January and February, rice for 2~3 days were given to the old and supporting families. After that, we bought the rice at Jangmadang price at the distribution center”. […]

The situation is similar to the situation at the end of food shortage in 1998. The number of people who come to China will increase soon. People at the border area know that why they are so poor because they are involved in trade with Chineses. All they have in their heart is anger”.

Mr. Hyun Joo Hoon (50) who sold goods in Pyongan and Hwanghae Province says, “People in Pyongan Province are worse off than those in border area”.

People in Pyongan Province and at border area both do not receive food from distribution system, but people in provinces without the capital to start business began to eat grassroots and porridge for meals. Mr. Hyun said, “I ate corn porridge because I only received five day worth of food”. Mr. Hyun said, he had seen the sick and the old dying of starvation at Soonchun and Dukchun in South Pyongan Province.

Mr. Hyun said, “It is because the government regulated the outflow of food to other provinces as the government ordered the regional governments to distribute food on their own”. In the fall of last year, North Korean government has regulated the outflow of food by placing posts at highways connecting different cities and districts.

Mr. Lee added, “People in the inner provinces believe the propaganda of the North Korean government that the reason for the poverty is the economic sanction by imperialists, even when they are dying. Unless their thoughts change, they cannot even resist”.

The Mufti of Egypt, on wife beating:

Wife-beating is associated with the cultural status of women in the different societies. Women in some cultures are not averse to beatings. They consider it as an expression of masculinity, and as a kind of control, which she herself desires. In other societies, it is the exact opposite. We must follow reason. When we are dealing with certain societies…

I got a question from Canada. The man said: “Here, it is a crime to beat a wife, even with a toothbrush. Is this prohibition acceptable in Islam? Yes. Islam accepts that the beating of Canadian wives, in this culture and ambience… From childhood they are taught that beating women is a type of barbarism, savagery, and so on. There is nothing wrong with taking this into consideration, and adapting to society, because Islam did not command us to be aggressive towards women.

If in their culture, this constitutes aggression towards women, then we are forbidden to be aggressive towards women. In this situation it is inevitable but to consider [beating] this way, and accepting the society, because Islam did not come and command me to be aggressive towards women. But when Allah permitted wife-beating, He permitted it to the other side of culture, which considers it as one of the means to preserve the family, and as one of the means to preserve stability.

I can’t somehow shake the image of this Canadian guy trying to beat his wife with a toothbrush.

point? If it doesn’t confront human dilemmas, human foibles, why make a novel of it? Why not just write a book about science…..about neurosurgery or whatever? Sadly, though it may be bad science, a novel needs a bit of something extra, like a Frankenstein….or a black labrador.

A chilling insight into the treatment of women dissidents in Iran (via b&w):

A leading Iranian pro-democracy and women’s activist, who was jailed on trumped-up charges last year, has revealed how the clerical regime cynically deploys systemic sexual violence against female dissidents in the name of Islam.

Roya Tolouee, 40, was beaten up by Iranian intelligence agents and subjected to a horrific sexual assault when she refused to sign forced confessions. It was only when they threatened to burn her two children to death in front of her that she agreed to put her name to the documents.

Perhaps just as shocking as the physical abuse were the chilling words of the man who led the attack. “When I asked how he could do this to me, he said that he believed in only two things – Islam and the rule of the clerics,” Miss Tolouee told The Sunday Telegraph last week in an interview in Washington after she fled Iran. […]

The world’s attention is currently focused on Iran’s nuclear ambitions under its hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who came to office while Miss Tolouee was in prison. But inside Iran, she says, little has changed.

“Sometimes the regime seems a bit better, sometimes a bit worse, but for the people of Iran, the suffering continues,” she said.

From the blog of Jan Pronk, UN representative in Sudan, pictures of a sandstorm over Khartoum.

of a meaningful UN intervention, and Rieff is right to caution against any US/NATO intervention. I don’t, however, buy Rieff’s argument that the interventionists are guilty of over-simplification:

My own view is that the main culprit here is human rightsism, a worldview that is based, as John Gray has put it, “on the moral intuitions of the liberal academy … a legalistic edifice from which politics has been excluded.” Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

Yes, the Janjaweed have homes and families, and are probably kind to their dogs too, but it’s a false
sophistication to make out that the situation is really too complex for a one-sided approach. To describe the former [the people being killed] simply as victims deprives them of any agency. What does that mean? Does he think the women from Darfur are somehow asking to be raped, their menfolk complicit in their own slaughter? Sometimes the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers is a pretty fair description of what’s happening.