Get Out of the Way if you can't Lend a Hand

Still can't get over the Catholic Church's policy in Darfur. As reported previously their bone-headedness has inspired me to join Amnesty and help fund their work. I do hope I'm not the only one to be so inspired.

Maybe I should kick up a fuss that some of the groups helping raped, battered children in Darfur are not carbon-neutral ?! Or not equal-opportunity employers ?

Sometimes you just need to get the job done.

And anyway, the Catholic Church has actually through history been unafraid to work with people who do not share their ideals to get the job done.

For example: Hitler, Mussolini and Napoleon.

They were also particularly "versatile" in Yugoslavia.

I wish they could harness that kind of can-do attitude to help (or at least fail to undermine) the work done by Amnesty in Darfur.

Sudan Death

I've a largish pile of stuff I've been meaning to get round to. In hot weather, my motivation slumbers and only the essentials get grudgingly done, and everything else goes into the pile.

Thanks to the Catholic Church's despicable posturing, the urgent Amnesty Darfur Appeal leaflet has now been rescued from this limbo.

Regular readers of this blog (yes, both of you) will know of my attachment to the Darfur situation. I know Iraq is a bigger humanitarian disaster, but Darfur is a no-brainer - there are bad guys and victims and we need to help the victims while going after the bad guys.

The Catholic Church (the ultimate "no-brainer" if ever I saw one), however, say that the victims need to be further victimised by having their right to abortion removed, even in cases of sexual violence or where the life of the mother or her health is very seriously threatened.

As a man, I find it difficult to imagine just how shattering a rape is for a woman, even in a developed country with hospitals, enough food, social services and a protecting police force. The concept of being a undernourished, traumatised, powerless, pregnant victim of a rape in a famine-hit kill-zone must be yet a stage further beyond comprehension.

What right do well-fed old white men have to restrict the kinds of people qualified to help the world's most pained people ? And this is a well-fed old white man saying it.

Amnesty suggest a number of ways that we can help. None of them seem controversial or unscriptural to me. But then I'm not a sanctimonious woman-hating hypocrite who would let my prejudices get in the way of doing the right thing.

Darfur II

Last week I looked down on Darfur from Google Earth. Today I saw some remarkable pictures of the real effect of those blackened specks.

The first good news in a long while is that the UN has been invited in. It's only 3,000 troops - which is less than half the existing African Union deployment - but it shows the international community seems to be taking this war seriously. Or at least shows they've noticed it at all.

In fact "war" is hardly the word. It reminds me strongly of the tyranny of Sadaam Hussein in gassing the Kurds. Or ... no, stoppit.

I'm very aware of Godwin's law : which states that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." and that overuse of the Nazi/Hitler comparison should be avoided, as it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.

But to me the only thing that's stopping the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed from being a 21st century version, is a lack of modern weaponry.

We in the West built the Iraqi war-machine as an antidote to fundamentalist Iran, and the weaponry was used to a shameful degree against a minority of Iraqis.

I'm sure it's more by luck than by judgement that the Sudanese weren't equally endowed.

Darfur

Sometimes you despair of the Internet. It's all too easy to see it as a sales channel for porn, gambling and erectile pharmaceuticals.

Google Earth have added some content from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to their satellite images of Darfur.

You can zoom in Darfur (it's in Sudan) and you're guided to some peculiar black markings on the ground. You can zoom in further and you realise that you are looking at burnt-out houses, thousands of them for miles and miles in each direction.

Every single one of the houses tells a story - usually a story involving the Sudanese government calling in an airstrike on the village, followed by their best mates the Janjaweed driving in to kill the surviving men, rape the surviving women and carry away anything portable before torching the place.

And we can see it ! I can then zoom the heck away to my own postcode where the view is reassuringly different. Then I can zoom back, and away and back and away. And you read the supporting information, about how the surviving women have to risk rape and death in order to gather firewood and find food for their families.

It's telling that it's the Holocaust museum that is involved. Would things have been different if the Internet were available in the 1940s and anyone could have called up satellite pictures of the Warsaw Ghetto, seen the smoke from the chimneys at Auschwitz, zoomed onto the parade ground at Dachau ?

I hope they are successful in their attempt to draw attention to this atrocity. The only people doing anything about the conflict just now are the African Union's 7000 troops, who are attempting to control an area the size of France.

Since I don't have any guns or tanks to blast the Janjaweed to Hades, I've had to content myself with giving to Oxfam, who are at least trying to help the survivors to survive.