Author: Mick Hartley

use any of the roads outside Geneina [the capital of west Darfur]. People cannot move and that means they can’t get to any of the camps in west Darfur.” […]

The latest UN report from Darfur paints a grim picture of daily killings and the forced removal of villagers from their homes. The report – which covers just four days in Darfur – notes the discovery of the bodies of two AU peacekeepers, killed in the ambush near Menawashi; an attack on the town of Liria in which 18 people died, 11 of them women; a fight over grazing rights in which an unknown number of people died and 100 families from Wandi were forced from their homes; the ambush of a truck on the near Tore in which four people died; the shooting dead by seven armed bandits of two passengers in a commercial vehicle and theft of six million Sudanese dinar; and the burning of the market in Kafod in which one person was killed and an aid agency forced to relocate its team.

Aid agencies say that without security in the region, they are powerless to help those most in need. Oxfam operates in 16 camps in Darfur but is currently unable to reach five because it is too dangerous to use the roads.

A spokeswoman for Oxfam said clashes between Sudanese government forces and rebels were hampering aid efforts.

Oxfam can’t reach five of its camps? So what will be the fate of the wretched camp inmates, at the mercy of Sudanese forces, and with no aid? Is the genocide stepping up a gear?

It’s telling that the Oxfam spokeswoman talks of “clashes between Sudanese government forces and rebels” which are “hampering aid efforts”. Of course we don’t know how effective the rebel forces are, but clearly it’s very much in the interests of the Sudanese government to present the situation as a civil war, with their forces trying to restore order in the face of rebel action, rather than a government-backed campaign of genocide against the black population of Darfur. It sounds like the government is calling all the shots, and the aid agencies are being intimidated into playing along.

Charles Jenkins, the US soldier who defected to North Korea, interviewed on CBS “60 Minutes” (via):

In the interview, to be aired on Sunday evening, Jenkins said from the time he deserted until 1980, when he married a Japanese woman who had been abducted to the North, the communist party allotted him a Korean woman and ordered him to sleep with her twice a month, prescribing the exact date this was to take place. When he bridled at the intrusion into every corner of his life, he was severely beaten.

On one occasion the authorities decided to remove a “US Army” tattoo from his forearm: the procedure was conducted without anesthetic using a pair of scissors and a scalpel. “They told me the anesthetic was for the battlefield,” Jenkins said. “It was hell.”

When Jenkins met his wife, he said, the only thing they had in common was their hatred of the regime. To salvage their sense of identity, they would say good night to each other in the other’s native language. Jenkins and three other Americans were forced to study Kim Il-Sung’s teachings for eight hours a day for the first seven years he spent in the country. “It was the worst mistake anyone ever made,” he said. “In words, I cannot express the feelings I have towards North Korea, the harassment I got. The hard life.”

Jenkins says he deserted in the first place because when serving as a sergeant at the border, he was ordered to take part in an assault mission and was also concerned that he might get shipped off to Vietnam. So one freezing night, after drinking 10 beers, he made his way across the border.

rly since 7/7 there has been growing questioning of the consequences of multiculturalism. From David Blunkett to CRE chief Trevor Phillips, many have talked of the need to reassert common values. Yet the fundamental tenets of the politics of difference remain largely unquestioned. The idea that society consists of a variety of distinct cultures, that all these cultures should be respected and preserved and that society should be organised to meet the distinct needs of different cultures—these continue to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, anti-racist outlook. The lesson of the past two decades, however, is this: a left that espouses multiculturalism makes itself redundant.

Iowahawk has some advice for novice bloggers: How to Blog Good, Part 2: Style-ize For Maximal Impactfulness. “Set CAP LOCKS ON, then wade into the fray with the hobnailed boots of passion….”

As expected, Detlev Mehlis’s UN report points the finger at Syria:

A UN inquiry into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri says many leads point to the direct involvement of Syrian officials.

UN investigators said they had also found evidence of Lebanese collusion in Mr Hariri’s death last February.

The report, prepared at the request of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, says the car bombing was carried out by a group with extensive organisation. […]

The BBC’s Ian Pannell in Damascus says it is widely believed that the Syrian authorities were angered by Mr Hariri’s growing opposition to their influence in Lebanon.

Although Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad constantly denies any involvement in the killing, the report will add to the sense of impending crisis felt in the country, our correspondent says.

Syria finds itself almost completely isolated, with little support from other Arab nations, and faces the prospect of crippling UN sanctions, he adds.

ven further to understand the disease, even to the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago. The ice pack came as far south as the Edgware Road Tube station. In the London area there were probably 20 people, who would have had to walk to Salisbury to find another group of humans. The population density was far too low to sustain influenza in humans as it requires a continual person-to-person spread. At that point in our history the flu was a bird disease. It took another 1,000 years or so before there were enough people in the world for the virus to spread and jump from birds to humans. But ever since then, the big reservoir for flu has been birds, mainly continent-crossing swans, geese and ducks.

..as far south as the Edgware Road Tube station. Eh? Is that meant to be a humourous aside?

refutations of particular points made by Lewy, but it does draw attention to the continuing effort on the part of Turkey and Turkish apologists to play down or to deny altogether the reality of the first modern genocide.

From a recent reading of Peter Balakian’s “The Burning Tigris“, I was surprised to learn how well-publicised the fate of the Armenians was at the time, with many Western papers, notably the New York Times, carrying almost daily reports of the latest atrocities. Afterwards, though, attempts to bring the leading perpetrators to justice, as happened to the leading Nazis at Nuremberg, were frustrated by Turkish intransigence and realpolitik on the part of the allies, who were eyeing up the Mesopotamian oil fields, and, later, were keen to have Turkey as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. So the world forgot. Ninety years later, through all the changes of the political landscape, nothing much has changed.

I’d always thought of Hitler’s remark, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians”, as just a throw-away comment – but of course it wasn’t. He was looking for a historical precedent for the genocide he was planning, and he found it…and he saw that it’d worked. A whole world – one of the earliest Christian civilisations, which had survived for over one and a half millennia spread over Eastern Anatolia, with a large community in Constantinople – was wiped out, and those responsible got away with it. (Oh, they’re restoring one Armenian church at Lake Van, as a tourist attraction. Isn’t that nice?)

The Germans were allies of the Turks during the First World War, helping to overhaul and modernise the Turkish army. Germans were specifically excluded from the anti-Christian jihad that fanned the flames of the Armenian massacres. They must have returned home after the war with some interesting tales to tell. Nearly all the familiar practicalities of the holocaust were prefigured by the Turks, from the nightmare train journeys, and the camps, to the dismissal of local authorities who were insufficiently zealous. And this has a familiar ring:

The Association for the Promotion of Turkish Strength, established in 1913, was dedicated to the military training of the youth so that the nation would become again “a warrior nation” in order to avoid disaster and “the decay of the Turkish race.” ..[T]he War Ministry also sponsored paramilitary youth groups, supplying them with free rifles and ammunition in order to prepare “for the defense of the fatherland.”

The main difference from the Nazi holocaust, apart from the scale, was that the Armenians were killed, on the whole, with considerably more brutality.

Much has been made – notably by Paul Berman – of the influence of Nazism and its Romantic precursors on Muslim thinkers, but the influence has surely not been all one-way.

Postscript: at Secular Blasphemy there’s a link to some photos of the Genocide at the National Archival Service of Norway.

ed:

Amnesty International is deeply concerned at the absence of defence lawyers and the apparent censorship during yesterday’s first court appearance by Saddam Hussein and 11 senior members of the former president’s government.

“The beginning of legal proceedings to determine responsibility for a series of crimes considered as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed over the last three decades, is to be welcomed. However, in order to bring justice to the thousands of victims, the proceedings must be fair, impartial and transparent,” Amnesty International said.

The organisation was particularly alarmed that defence counsel was not made available to the accused at yesterday’s hearing. Although the judge said that Saddam Hussein would be allowed legal defence in future, he and the other accused should have been given access to defence representation right from the beginning of the process.

But, as Jan at Secular Blasphemy argues, all this concern is surely misplaced. Why must the trial be seen to be fair? What does that mean in this context? That there are two versions of the truth? – one where the Baathist regime under Saddam terrorised the Iraqi people, gassed the Kurds, tortured and murdered political opponents, invaded Iran and Kuwait, etc. etc. – and another where none of this happened? So the evidence is presented to the jury, and they have to decide which history is true? It’s clearly nonsense. We know what happened.

A trial like this is never going to be like a normal trial, with the accused given the opportunity to cross-examine and question the motives of the prosecution, and nor should it be. The outcome is pre-ordained: Saddam must be found guilty. Any other outcome would be to deny history. The trial should be an occasion for the scale of his crimes to be documented, for those Iraqis whom Saddam terrorised for so long to be given the opportunity to confront him at last, for the country to finally purge itself of the horrors of the past – not for a grandstanding effort by Saddam and his defence to team to denounce his accusers and use every legalistic nicety to turn the whole thing into a farce, which would surely be the case should all the concerns of Western human rights organisations be met.

The idea of a war crimes tribunal as a trial under international law is not meeting with marked success in the case of Milosevic in the Hague. Let the Iraqis do what they want, and ignore the misplaced concerns of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.

of the intervention. It would make as much sense to say that the murderous terrorism of the religious sectarians is the product of the intervention.

Ah, but that is exactly what the moral cretins do say about Zarqawi and his death squads. There may be an argument about the authenticity of the newly released Zawahiri/Zarqawi correspondence, and I myself make no pronouncement. But as it happens, we know from many open sources that there is a debate among the jihadists as to the wisdom and even the propriety of killing civilians without discrimination, or of slaughtering the Shiites as if they were all heretics or apostates. One of Zarqawi’s mentors has even weighed in, on a Muslim Web site, questioning the excessive zeal of his disciple. So even the most stone-cold killers and dogmatists have to wonder, and to worry, about the balance of forces in Iraq. I take this as a sign of encouragement. Perhaps, since they, too, are human, they will have to worry about the enormous casualties they are taking, as well as inflicting.

/a>), but at the Rome conference being held to mark the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation, the delegates give a cheer to the man responsible:

Mr Mugabe used his speech to lambast President Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose governments have been among his severest critics.

“Must we allow these men, the two unholy men of our millennium, who in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini formed [an] unholy alliance, form an alliance to attack an innocent country?” asked Mr Mugabe, apparently referring to Iraq.

“The voice of Mr Bush and the voice of Mr Blair can’t decide who shall rule in Zimbabwe, who shall rule in Africa, who shall rule in Asia, who shall rule in Venezuela, who shall rule in Iran, who shall rule in Iraq,” he said.

Mr Mugabe said his land reforms, which enabled the government to seize hundreds of farms owned mostly by white Zimbabweans, had been part of a process to correct colonial injustices.

He blamed agricultural subsidies offered to farm produce from developed countries for crippling “the development of agriculture in developing countries”.

Delegates applauded Mr Mugabe at the end of his speech.