Politics ONE

xdancer said:
that still doesn't answer my question about what money is going to the people who are causing the genocide in Sudan.  where did you get that information?
[post="1417404"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post]​
read the article in the April 30, 2005 issue of the LA Times by Ken Silverstein titled "Official Pariah Sudan Valuable to America's War on Terrorism".
 
xdancer said:
I can't read an article from the LA Times from that long ago without paying for it.  can you paraphrase it?
[post="1420795"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post]​
In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush issued an ultimatum to the world: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Three and half years later, it has been revealed that the Bush administration has allied itself with a government listed as a state sponsor of terrorism and one that the administration has accused of committing genocide against its own people - Sudan.

A major expose in the Los Angeles Times revealed that the U.S. has quietly forged a close intelligence partnership with Sudan despite the government's role in the mass killings in Darfur. The Sudanese government has since publicly confirmed it is working with the Bush administration and the CIA.

Over ten months ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell accused the Sudanese of carrying out a genocide in Darfur. Already 180,000 have died in the region from fighting or hunger. But relations appear to have since changed -- for the better. One senior Sudanese official the LA Times that the country had achieved "complete normalization" of relations with the CIA.

The Times reported that the CIA sent an executive jet in late-April 2005 to Khartoum to ferry the chief of Sudan's intelligence agency to Washington for secret meetings sealing Khartoum's sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the administration.

The Sudanese intelligence chief - Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh - has been accused by members of Congress of directing military attacks against civilians in Darfur. He also had regular contacts with Osama bin Laden during the 1990s.

In April 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent a letter to the Sudanese government calling for steps to end the conflict in Darfur. But the letter, reviewed by the Times, also said the administration hoped to establish a "fruitful relationship" with Sudan and looked forward to continued "close cooperation" on terrorism.
 
This is why something needs to be done.

Malnourished children cling to life in Niger

MARADI, Niger (AP) -- Nasseiba Ali is the face of hunger in Niger. The 20-month-old girl weighs just 12 pounds, and her eyes are clouded at night, one of the symptoms of her chronic malnourishment.

Nasseiba may survive because her grandmother was able to get her to a feeding center. But aid groups despair that so many other children are dying because the world was slow to respond.

"I thought we would not make it safely," Nasseiba's grandmother, Haoua Adamou, said in Hausa through an interpreter after walking several hours with the baby on her back to the emergency feeding center at Maradi, some 400 miles east of the capital, Niamey.

She sat Saturday fanning flies from Nasseiba's face.

The aid agency Oxfam warned last week that about 3.6 million people, about a third of them children, face starvation in this West African nation devastated by locusts and drought. The U.N.'s humanitarian agency estimates some 800,000 children under 5 are suffering from hunger, including 150,000 faced with severe malnutrition.

The warnings have been coming for months. The United Nations first appealed for assistance in November and got almost no response. Another appeal for $16 million in March generated about $1 million. The latest appeal on May 25 for $30 million has received about $10 million.

Donations jumped dramatically in the last week because of increased media attention and TV images of starving children, U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said Friday. Egeland estimated that thousands of children are dying in Niger.

Nasseiba dozed fitfully in the intensive care tent of the emergency center erected by Doctors Without Borders in Maradi, where 55 other chronically malnourished children were receiving care. Her mother, who is three months pregnant, and her father stayed behind to work their farm to coax something from the dry soil come the October harvest.

Nasseiba tried several times to pull out the tiny feeding tube securely taped to her forehead and running down into her nose. She found sleep after several meager mouthfuls of enriched formula and what looked like a long, cold stare, sign of her troubled vision that leaves her blind at night.

Just a few steps from the critically sick, another ward sheltered children who have almost recovered.

Two-year-old Tsclaha weighed just 13 pounds and will need days to reach her target weight of 16 pounds before being declared cured.

Tsclaha, barely able to stand on wobbly legs, happily munched a ready-to-eat, highly nutritious peanut butter mixture. Tsclaha wore a red bracelet, signaling doctors had decided to admit her.

Nearby, 40 women carrying children waited for them to be weighed and for doctors to decide which ones would get red bracelets and which ones would get orange or yellow bracelets signifying that they, while malnourished, were well enough to be sent home with supplies of flour and cooking oil.

Outside the center, new tents are being set up to ease the burden on the already stretched facility, where nurses work round the clock to diagnose the 300 hungry children who come daily from surrounding villages.

A 16-ton shipment of oil, sugar, and nutritional paste arrived in Maradi from France on Thursday, and several more shipments were scheduled, the U.N. World Food Program said.

But the need is great and growing in this desert nation of 11.3 million regularly ranked among the world's least developed. When the first appeal was made, only $1 per day, per person would have helped solve the food crisis, the U.N. has said. Now that the situation has worsened and people are weaker, $80 will be needed per person.

"It's the worst I've seen," said Hassan Balla, a primary school teacher in Tarna, a village just outside Maradi. "What is happening is really ugly. I've seen people eat leaves ... live like animals."

Balla, however, is optimistic.

"The world is generous," he said. "Our friends heard our cries. Do you think they will let us suffer when they are living comfortably?"
 
Tsk. This should not be an argument about whether Bush or Clinton is doing more for Africa. Determining a "winner" for that argument will not help the starving children of the African countries.

And Jamison, that article hits it right on the dot. THAT is the reason why industrialized countries need to wake up.

At the same time, I'd like Bush to pay a little closer attention to the poverty within his own country. However, I admit the man can't be everywhere at once - and Africa is in a bit more dire of a situation. So while trying to convince world leaders to do more overseas, perhaps we, the regular citizens, should do more to help with the poverty within our own countries? I know I've started by offerring to volunteer during the lunch hour at a nearby soup kitchen twice a week. I've heard that every little bit helps.
 
Existentialist said:
Tsk. This should not be an argument about whether Bush or Clinton is doing more for Africa. Determining a "winner" for that argument will not help the starving children of the African countries.

And Jamison, that article hits it right on the dot. THAT is the reason why industrialized countries need to wake up.

At the same time, I'd like Bush to pay a little closer attention to the poverty within his own country. However, I admit the man can't be everywhere at once - and Africa is in a bit more dire of a situation. So while trying to convince world leaders to do more overseas, perhaps we, the regular citizens, should do more to help with the poverty within our own countries? I know I've started by offerring to volunteer during the lunch hour at a nearby soup kitchen twice a week. I've heard that every little bit helps.
[post="1429913"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post]​


I completely agree with it all!

This is not about whether Bush or Clinton did more, and it's not really appropriate to bicker about something so trivial.

The African situation is terrible, and I think everyone who is able should donate money or do something to help.

But as Existentialist said, there is also so much poverty in our own country, in our communities and it seems to go unnoticed. While the situation in Africa is obviously exponentially worse, attention also should be paid on what can be done to help people in this country as well.
 
Existentialist said:
Tsk. This should not be an argument about whether Bush or Clinton is doing more for Africa. Determining a "winner" for that argument will not help the starving children of the African countries.

And Jamison, that article hits it right on the dot. THAT is the reason why industrialized countries need to wake up.

[post="1429913"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post]​
You may tsk all you wish, but I was not trying to argue over whether Bush or Clinton did more, I was simply presenting an op-ed piece by a writer I respect (Nicholas Kristof has done a lot to bring attention to the crisis in Darfur). He did mention Clinton, but I thouht other parts of the article were more important. I thought it was interesting to note that the Bush administration has done good things for Africa (although, of course it isn't all good). This board seems to have a lot of liberals, and i notice that liberals, including myself, sometimes don't want to see shades of gray when it comes to the Bush administration. They (and I'm guilty of this as well) only want to see the Republican leaders as all-bad. I think, if we want to truly help better the poverty, hunger, and disease in the world, we need to be able to work together, people of all backgrounds and ideology, instead of villifying certain people. That article made me stop and think, and I simply wanted to share it.

and I promise I wasn't trying to bash Clinton in any way (I didn't write the article). In fact, I really wasn't concerned with his presidency considering his presidency is very much in the past, and I'm a litttle more concerned over what the international community is doing for Africa today. However, here's what he's been up to lately:

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Former U.S. President Bill Clinton pledged Thursday to help Kenya to expand HIV/AIDS care and treatment, particularly for children and people living in rural areas that traditionally receive the least services in poor countries.

Clinton said his foundation has received grants worth US$1.5 million (euro1.24 million) to help train medical workers for deployment in rural areas in this East African nation.

The money came from Elton John and the Children Investment Fund Foundation, a London-based charity that funds projects to improve the lives of children living in poverty in poor nations, Clinton said.

Some 1.2 million Kenyans are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. About 200,000 of these need treatment with life-prolonging drugs, but only 44,000 have access to the medication.

"I hope in the next couple of years we will be putting 150,000 people on treatment," Clinton said during a joint press conference with Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki.

Based on current estimates, it costs about US$20 (euro17) a person a year to do the tests needed to monitor the effectiveness of the life-prolonging drugs in Kenya. It costs an additional US$140 a person a year for the medicine, Clinton said.

It also costs about US$200 (euro165) a child a year to provide medicine, he said.

"So, we really do have a chance here to get medicine to all the children who need it, all the people in rural areas who need it, and in the aggregate, the entire population who need it," Clinton said.

"I think we have a chance to get there, and I will work like crazy to get it done -- that's all I can tell you. And it will be a lot of money," he said.

Clinton is on a six-nation tour of Africa to focus attention on the AIDS crisis in the continent.

Since 2002, the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative has been assisting countries in care, treatment and prevention programs. It has partnerships with more than a dozen countries in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia.
source:http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/07/22/africa.clinton.ap/index.html

As for Jamison's article, I agree that it was a poignant and well-written article. Thanks for posting it, Jamison.
 
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