Saviors and Survivors

From Amazon.com:

Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (Hardcover)
by Mahmood Mamdani
List Price: $26.95

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Book Description

From the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim comes an important book, unlike any other, that looks at the crisis in Darfur within the context of the history of Sudan and examines the world’s response to that crisis.

In Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani explains how the conflict in Darfur began as a civil war (1987—89) between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the south, triggered by a severe drought that had expanded the Sahara Desert by more than sixty miles in forty years; how British colonial officials had artificially tribalized Darfur, dividing its population into “native” and “settler” tribes and creating homelands for the former at the expense of the latter; how the war intensified in the 1990s when the Sudanese government tried unsuccessfully to address the problem by creating homelands for tribes without any. The involvement of opposition parties gave rise in 2003 to two rebel movements, leading to a brutal insurgency and a horrific counterinsurgency–but not to genocide, as the West has declared.

Mamdani also explains how the Cold War exacerbated the twenty-year civil war in neighboring Chad, creating a confrontation between Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi (with Soviet support) and the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) that spilled over into Darfur and militarized the fighting. By 2003, the war involved national, regional, and global forces, including the powerful Western lobby, who now saw it as part of the War on Terror and called for a military invasion dressed up as “humanitarian intervention.”

Incisive and authoritative, Saviors and Survivors will radically alter our understanding of the crisis in Darfur.

Saviors and Survivors invites the reader to rethink the lesson of Rwanda in light of Darfur. It is a warning to those who would act first and understand later.

Part One discusses the nature of Save Darfur advocacy. Like the War on Terror from which it has borrowed its assumptions and coordinates, Save Darfur has turned into a lavishly funded and massive ad campaign spreading and sustaining a lethal illusion, consistently exaggerating the level of mortality and racializing the reasons for it. Why has Save Darfur not lost credibility even though its information is increasingly divorced from reality? A part of the answer lies in its ability to turn activism around Darfur into a domestic "feel good" issue while obscuring the context of the violence in Darfur.

Part Two of the book explains this context, starting with correcting the widely-held assumption that Arab tribes of Sudan are settlers from the Middle East, when they actually comprise local tribes that adopted the Arabic language and identity in the course of forming local states. The book locates the roots of the current conflict in colonialism, ecology, and the Cold War: colonialism introduced into Darfur a system of local discrimination based on tribal identity; an ongoing ecological crisis has led to the expansion of the Sahara by a hundred kilometers in four decades, igniting a conflict between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the mountains of the south; and, finally, the Cold War confrontation in Chad between Gaddafi (with Soviet support) and the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) spilled over into Darfur and militarized the conflict.

Part Three explains the Darfur crisis. Rather than a willful attempt by the government to eliminate particular groups--genocide--the present phase of the conflict stems from a land-based ecological confrontation at the local level and a struggle for power at the central level, exacerbated by the ongoing War on Terror. The urgent need today is not to punish those responsible for the mass killings of 2003-04 but to arrive at a political solution that will reform the land system in Darfur and political power in Sudan.

From Publishers Weekly

Mamdani (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim) continues to challenge political and intellectual orthodoxies in his latest book, a bold, near brilliant re-examination of the conflict in Darfur. While acknowledging the horrendous violence committed in the region, Mamdani contends that Darfur is not the site of genocide but rather a site where the language of genocide has been used as an instrument. The author believes that the war on terror provided an international political context in which the perpetrators of violence in Darfur could be categorized as Arabs seeking to eradicate black Africans in the region. Challenging these racial distinctions, Mamdani traces the history of Sudan and the origins of the current conflict back past the 10th century to demonstrate how the divide between Arab and non-Arab ethnic groups is political rather than racial in nature. The author persuasively argues that the conflict in Darfur is a political problem, with a historical basis, requiring a political solution—facilitated not by the U.N. or a global community but rather by the African Union and other African states. The book's introductory and closing chapters are essential reading for those interested in the topic.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

If the nations of the world waited too long to react to the genocide in Rwanda, they have been too hasty in reacting to declarations of genocide in Darfur, according to Mamdani, scholar and author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004). Exploring the moral dilemma of not wanting to be “good Germans” who ignore evil, Mamdani argues for the need to investigate and gain the knowledge necessary to bring about real and lasting peace in the region. He begins with a historical analysis of Sudan and the Darfur region, focusing on traditions, tribes, race, and locality and how assumptions from earlier eras continue to influence current geopolitical viewpoints. He also examines how the cold war and the current war on terror have affected Western viewpoints on the ethnic divisions and politics within Sudan, arguing that the seeming conflict between native and settler tribes is far more complex and requires an approach similar to the South African model of reconciliation after atrocity to bring about lasting peace. By providing broader context, Mamdani brings fresh perspective to conflict in this troubled region. --Vanessa Bush

Reviews

“Mamdani traces the path to the Darfur tragedy through its historical and colonial roots to the current situation, where drought and desertification have led to conflict over land among local tribes, rebellion, and finally to the brutal involvement of the forces of the state and to the efforts of the United Nations and others to help the victims and stop the violence. His radical reevaluation of the Darfur problem is a major contribution to understanding and, it is to be hoped, to ending a shocking human disaster.”
–Sir Brian Urquhart, former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations

“An incisive and challenging analysis. Framing both Darfur’s war and the ‘Save Darfur’ movement within the paradigm of the West’s historic colonial encounter with Africa, Mahmood Mamdani challenges the reader to reconsider whether Darfur’s crisis is ‘genocide’ warranting foreign military intervention.”
–Alex de Waal, Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and author of War in Darfur

“Mahmood Mamdani has turned his fearless independence of mind on Darfur, Sudan, and the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ producing a book that is as passionate and well-informed as it is intelligent and (for those used only to surface orthodoxies) challenging.”
–Conor Gearty, Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics

“A brilliantly argued and profoundly challenging critique of liberal support for humanitarian intervention in Darfur. Beyond this, Mamdani sets forth an alternative approach to such catastrophic situations. This book should be required reading for the Obama foreign policy team.”
–Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur and Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

“A bold, near brilliant re-examination of the conflict in Darfur . . . Essential reading for those interested in the topic.”
–Publishers Weekly

“A necessary contribution to the literature surrounding both humanitarian aid and African geopolitics.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“By providing broader context, Mamdani brings fresh perspective to conflict in this troubled region.”
–Booklist

About the Author

Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a member of the departments of anthropology; political science; and Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. His previous books include Good Muslim, Bad Muslim; Citizen and Subject; and When Victims Become Killers. Originally from Uganda, he now divides his time between Kampala and New York, where he lives with his wife and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION

The Save Darfur movement claims to have learned from Rwanda. But what is the lesson of Rwanda? For many of those mobilized to save Darfur, the lesson is to rescue before it is too late, to act before seeking to understand. Though it is never explicitly stated, Rwanda is recalled as a time when we thought we needed to know more; we waited to find out, to learn the difference between Tutsi and Hutu, and why one was killing the other, but it was too late. Needing to know turned into an excuse for doing nothing. What is new about Darfur, human rights interventionists will tell you, is the realization that sometimes we must respond ethically and not wait. That time is when genocide is occurring.

But how do we know it is genocide? Because we are told it is. This is why the battle for naming turns out to be all- important: Once Darfur is named as the site of genocide, people recognize something they have already seen elsewhere and conclude that what they know is enough to call for action. They need to know no more in order to act. But killing is not what defines genocide. Killing happens in war, in insurgency and counterinsurgency. It is killing with intent to eliminate an entire group—a race, for example—that is genocide.

Those who prioritize knowing over doing assume that genocide is the name of a consequence, and not its context or cause. But how do we decipher “intent” except by focusing on both context and consequence? The connection between the two is the only clue to naming an action. We shall see that the violence in Darfur was driven by two issues: one local, the other national. The local grievance focused on land and had a double background; its deep background was a colonial legacy of parceling Darfur between tribes, with some given homelands and others not; its immediate background was a four-decades-long process of drought and desertification that exacerbated the conflict between tribes with land and thosewithout.The national contextwas a rebellion that brought the state into an ongoing civil (tribal) war.

The conflict in Darfur began as a localized civil war (1987–89) and turned into a rebellion (beginning in 2003). That Darfur was the site of genocide was the view of one side in the civil war—the tribes with land whosought to keep out landless or land-poor tribes fleeing the advancing drought and desert. As early as the 1989 reconciliation conference in Darfur, that side was already using the language of “genocide”—and indeed “holocaust.” But that charge was made against the coalition of tribes they fought, and not against the government of Sudan. In spite of this important difference, that language has come to inform the view of those who blew the whistle—genocide—at theU.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2004 and was translated into a unanimous resolution of both houses of theU.S.Congress that year.

Observers noted the exceptional brutality with which both sides fought the civil war. This derived in part from the zero-sum nature of the conflict: the land conflict was about group survival. If the stakes were already high, the lethal means to wage this bitter conflict were provided by external powers. In the opening phase, these deadly weapons came from adversaries in the Cold War over Chad: Colonel Muammar al-Quaddafi of Libya and the anti-Libyan triad (Reaganite America, France, and Israel); with the onset of rebellion, the government of Sudan stepped in to wage a brutal counterinsurgency, just as the managers of the War on Terror set about framing the government as genocidaire while shielding the insurgents in the name of justice.

There have been two international reports on the post-2003 violence in Darfur. The first was by the U.N. Commission on Darfur (2005) and the second from the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (2008). Neither paid attention to the land question that has fueled the two-decades-long civil war in Darfur. Instead, they focused on those who had contributed to further militarizing the conflict. But even that focus was partial, limited to the government of Sudan; it was silent about the role of regional and international powers in exacerbating and militarizing the conflict over the Cold War and the subsequent War on Terror.

The U.N. Commission concluded “that the Government of Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide,” for the element of “genocidal intent” was missing. It derived the government’s lack of genocidal intent from the context of the violence: “it would seem that those who planned and organized attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily for purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.”1 In contrast, when the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court charged the president of Sudan, Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir, with genocide, he focused on the consequences of the violence, not its context.

Let us compare deaths related to violence in two places: Darfur and Iraq. The Darfur insurgency began in 2003, the same year as the United States invaded Iraq. I discuss estimates of the number of “excess deaths” (that is, deaths beyond what would ordinarily be expected) in Darfur in chapter 1, but, briefly, the estimates for the period during which the violence was horrendous (2003–4) range from 70,000 to 400,000. Compare this with three available estimates of excess deaths in Iraq following the U.S. invasion in 2003.* The lowest comprehensive estimate, from the Iraqi Health Ministry survey, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, is of 400,000 Iraqi deaths, of which 151,000 are said to be “violent deaths.” A middling estimate is from the British medical journal The Lancet: an estimated 654,965 excess deaths, of which 601,027 are said to be violent. The highest estimate comes from a survey by Opinion Research Business, an independent polling agency located in London: 1,033,000 violent deaths as a result of the conflict. The first two estimates cover the period from the 2003 invasion to June 2006. The third survey extends to August 2007.2

Not only are the figures for Iraq far higher than those for Darfur, ranging from a low of 400,000 to a high of 1,033,000, but the proportion of violent deaths in relation to the total excess mortality is also far higher in Iraq than in Darfur: 38 percent to nearly 92 percent in Iraq, but 20 to 30 percent in Darfur. So why do we call the killing in Darfur genocide but not that in Iraq? Is it because, despite the wide disparity in the number of excess deaths, whether violence- related or violent, victims and perpetrators belong to different races in Darfur but not in Iraq? That is what many assume, but the facts do not bear this out.

Those who blew the whistle on Darfur in 2004 have continued to argue, for almost four years, that the violence in Darfur is racially motivated, perpetrated by “light- skinned Arabs” on “black Africans.” In the chapters that follow, I suggest that this kind of framing of the violence continues the error that came out of the colonial tradition of racializing the peoples of Sudan.

This book invites the reader to rethink Rwanda in light of Darfur. Rather than a call to act in the face of moral certainty, it is an argument against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance.

Indeed, the lesson of Darfur is a warning to those who would act first and understand later. Only those possessed of disproportionate power can afford to assume that knowing is irrelevant, thereby caring little about the consequences of their actions. Not only is this mind-set the driving force behind the War on Terror, it also provides the selfindulgent motto of the human rights interventionist recruited into the ranks of the terror warriors. This feel-good imperative can be summed up as follows: as long as I feel good, nothing else matters. It is this shared mind-set that has turned the movement to Save Darfur into the humanitarian face of the War on Terror.

In contrast to those who suggest that we act the minute the whistle blows, I suggest that, even before the whistle blows, we ceaselessly try to know the world in which we live—and act. Even if we must act on imperfect knowledge, we must never act as if knowing is no longer relevant.

Save Darfur activists combine a contemptuous attitude toward knowing with an imperative to act. Trying hard not to be “good Germans,” they employ techniques of protest politics against their own government—and now the government of China—and turn a deaf ear to experts who they claim only complicate the story with so many details as to miss the main point. Instead, they rely on the evidence of their eyes and avoid any discussion of context. But by letting pictures and interviews do the talking, they have opened an entire movement to “the CNN effect.” If “good Germans” were taught to trust their leaders first and ask questions later, the good souls mobilized to save Darfur are taught to trust pictures above all else and ask questions later. Above all, they strip Darfur—and the violence in Darfur—of context.

Product Details

Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Pantheon (March 17, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307377237
ISBN-13: 978-0307377234

The expiring economy

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4992.shtml

The expiring economy
By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 7, 2009

Tent cities springing up all over America are filling with the homeless unemployed from the worst economy since the 1930s. While Americans live in tents, the Obama government has embarked on a $1 billion crash program to build a mega-embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, to rival the one the Bush government built in Baghdad, Iraq.

Hard times have now afflicted Americans for so long that even the extension of unemployment benefits from six months to 18 months for 24 high unemployment states, and to 46-72 weeks in other states, is beginning to run out. By Christmas 1.5 million Americans will have exhausted unemployment benefits while unemployment rolls continue to rise.

Amidst this worsening economic crisis, the House of Representatives just passed a $636 billion “defense” bill.

Who is the United States defending against? Americans have no enemies except those that the US government goes out of its way to create by bombing and invading countries that comprise no threat whatsoever to the US and by encircling others -- Russia for example -- with threatening military bases.

America’s wars are contrived affairs to serve the money-laundering machine: from the taxpayers and money borrowed from foreign creditors to the armaments industry to the political contributions that ensure $636 billion “defense” bills.

President George W. Bush gave us wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are entirely based on lies and misrepresentations. But Obama has done Bush one better. Obama has started a war in Pakistan with no explanation whatsoever.

If the armaments industry and the neoconservative brownshirts have their way, the US will also be at war with Iran, Russia, Sudan and North Korea.

Meanwhile, America continues to be overrun, as it has been for decades, not by armed foreign enemies but by illegal immigrants across America’s porous and undefended borders.

It is more proof of the Orwellian time in which we live that $636 billion appropriated for wars of aggression is called a “defense bill.”

Who is going to pay for all of this? When foreign countries have spent their trade surpluses and have no more dollars to recycle into the purchase of Treasury bonds, when US banks have used up their “bailout” money by purchasing Treasury bonds, and when the Federal Reserve cannot print any more money to keep the government going without pushing up inflation and interest rates, the taxpayer will be all that is left. Already Obama’s two top economic advisors, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers, are floating the prospect of a middle class tax increase. Will Obama be maneuvered away from his promise just as Bush Sr. was?

Will Americans see the disconnect between their interests and the interests of “their” government? In the small town of Vassalboro, Maine, a few topless waitress jobs in a coffee house drew 150 applicants. Women in this small town are so desperate for jobs that they are reduced to undressing for their neighbors’ amusement.

Meanwhile, the Obama government is going to straighten out Afghanistan and Pakistan and build marble palaces to awe the locals half way around the world.

The US government keeps hyping “recovery” the way Bush hyped “terrorist threat” and “weapons of mass destruction.” The recovery is no more real than the threats. Indeed, it is possible that the economic collapse has hardly begun. Let’s look at what might await us here at home while the US government pursues hegemony abroad.

The real estate crisis is not over. More home foreclosures await as unemployment rises and unemployment benefits are exhausted. The commercial real estate crisis is yet to hit. More bailouts are coming, and they will have to be financed by more debt or money creation. If there are not sufficient purchasers for the Treasury bonds, the Federal Reserve will have to purchase them by creating checking accounts for the Treasury, that is, by debt monetization or the printing of money.

More debt and money creation will put more pressure on the US dollar’s exchange value. At some point import prices, which include offshored goods and services of US corporations, will rise, adding to the inflation fueled by domestic money creation. The Federal Reserve will be unable to hold down interest rates by buying bonds.

No part of US economic policy addresses the systemic crisis in American incomes. For most Americans real income ceased to grow some years ago. Americans have substituted second jobs and debt accumulation for the missing growth in real wages. With most households maxed out on debt and jobs disappearing, these substitutes for real income growth no longer exist.

The Bush-Obama economic policy actually worsens the systemic crisis that the US dollar faces as reserve currency. The fact that there might be no alternative to the dollar as reserve currency does not guarantee that the dollar will continue in this role. Countries might find it less risky to settle trade transactions in their own currencies.

How does an economy based heavily on consumer spending recover when so many high-value-added jobs, and the GDP and payroll tax revenues associated with them, have been moved offshore and when consumers have no more assets to leverage in order to increase their spending?

How does the US pay for its imports if the dollar is no longer used as reserve currency?

These are the unanswered questions.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.

Al-Jazeera cameraman freed from Guantanamo

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080502/ap_on_re_mi_ea/guantanamo_journalist_freed

Al-Jazeera cameraman freed from Guantanamo after 6 years
By MOHAMED OSMAN, Associated Press Writer
5-2-8

An Al-Jazeera cameraman was released from U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay and returned home to Sudan early Friday after six years of imprisonment that drew worldwide protests.

Sami al-Haj, who had been on a hunger strike for 16 months, grimaced as he was carried off a U.S. military plane by American personnel in Sudan's capital, Khartoum. He was put on a stretcher and taken straight to a hospital.

Al-Jazeera showed footage of al-Haj being carried into the hospital, looking feeble and with his eyes closed, but smiling. Some of the men surrounding his stretcher were kissing him on the cheek.

"Thank God ... for being free again," he told Al-Jazeera from his hospital bed. "Our eyes have the right to shed tears after we have spent all those years in prison. ... But our joy is not going to be complete until our brothers in Guantanamo Bay are freed," he added.

"The situation is very bad and getting worse day after day," he said of conditions in Guantanamo. He claimed guards prevent Muslims from practicing their religion and reading the Quran.

"Some of our brothers live without clothing," he said.

The U.S. military says it goes to great lengths to respect the religion of detainees, issuing them Qurans, enforcing quiet among guard staff during prayer calls throughout the day. All cells in Guantanamo have an arrow that points toward the holy city of Mecca.

Al-Haj was released along with two other Sudanese from Guantanamo Thursday. He was the only journalist from a major international news organization held at Guantanamo and many of his supporters saw his detention as punishment for a network whose broadcasts angered U.S. officials.

The military alleged he was a courier for a militant Muslim organization, an allegation his lawyers denied.

Al-Haj said he believed he was arrested because of U.S. hostility toward Al-Jazeera and because the media was reporting on U.S. rights violations in Afghanistan.

Al-Haj was detained in December 2001 by Pakistani authorities as he tried to enter Afghanistan to cover the U.S.-led invasion. He was turned over to the U.S. military and taken in January 2002 to Guantanamo Bay, where the United States holds some 275 men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban, most of them without charges.

Reprieve, the British human rights group that represents 35 Guantanamo prisoners including al-Haj, said Pakistani forces apparently seized al-Haj at the behest of the U.S. authorities who suspected he had interviewed Osama bin Laden.

But that "supposed intelligence" turned out to be false, Reprieve said in a news release.

"This is wonderful news, and long overdue," said Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's director, who has represented al-Haj since 2005. "The U.S. administration has never had any reason for holding Mr. Al Haj, and has, instead, spent six years shamelessly attempting to turn him against his employers at Al-Jazeera."

Sudanese officials said al-Haj would not face any charges.

The U.S. Embassy in Khartoum issued a brief statement confirming the detainee transfer with Sudan and saying it appreciated Sudan's cooperation.

Al-Haj's lawyers said the 38-year-old has been on hunger strike since January 2007 to protest conditions and indefinite confinement at the prison.

Attorney Zachary Katznelson of Reprieve, who met al-Haj at Guantanamo on April 11, said he was "emaciated" because of his hunger strike. and had recently been having problems with his liver and kidneys and had blood in his urine.

"Sami is a poster child for everything that is wrong about Guantanamo Bay: No charges, no trial, constantly shifting allegations, brutal treatment, no visits with family, not even a phone call home," Katznelson said Thursday.

"Sami was never alleged to have hurt a soul, and was never proven to have committed any crimes. Yet, he had fewer rights than convicted mass murderers or rapists. What has happened to American justice?"

Al-Jazeera is based in Qatar and is funded by the royal family of the Persian Gulf nation. Its Arabic channel has been excoriated by the Bush administration as a mouthpiece for terrorists including Osama bin Laden.

Wadah Khanfar, managing director of Al-Jazeera Arabic, said of al-Haj's release: "We are overwhelmed with joy."

Al-Haj was never prosecuted at Guantanamo so the U.S did not make public its full allegations against him. But in a hearing that determined that he was an enemy combatant, U.S. officials alleged that in the 1990s, al-Haj was an executive assistant at a Qatar-based beverage company that provided support to Muslim fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya.

The U.S. claimed he also traveled to Azerbaijan at least eight times to carry money on behalf of his employer to the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a now defunct charity that U.S. authorities say funded militant groups.

The officials said during this period that he met Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a senior lieutenant to Osama bin Laden who was arrested in Germany in 1998 and extradited to the United States. Officials did not provide details.

Reprieve identified the two other Sudanese Guantanamo detainees who were released as Amir Yacoub Al Amir and Walid Ali.

Reprieve also said Moroccan detainee Said Boujaadia, 39, was also released. He was flown home on the same plane as al-Haj, which made a stop in Morocco. The group said he was taken into custody in Morocco.

E.U. weighs Olympic boycott over Tibet

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0327/p04s01-woeu.html

from the March 27, 2008 edition
E.U. weighs Olympic boycott over Tibet
The European Union meets Friday to discuss ties to China after the unrest in Tibet.
By Robert Marquand Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Paris

If the government of China hopes the world will go for its line on Tibet and the nefarious Dalai Lama and his purported "clique" – Europe isn't buying it.

The response to the Tibetan crisis in London, Paris, and Berlin, rather, is a call for "dialogue" between China and the exiled Tibetan leader, and"restraint" by Beijing.

A boycott of the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games is being discussed as a leverage point in Austria, Belgium, Britain, and France – to be determined by how China handles the frustrations of its Tibetan minority.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has "left open the option" of boycotting the ceremony, Germany has blocked talks with China on economic development, and Britain's foreign secretary, David Miliband, says that Tibet demonstrations will be authorized as the Olympic torch is carried through London on April 6.

Prince Charles, a friend of the Dalai Lama, had already decided in January not to attend the opening ceremony, he said, in a letter to a human rights group.

Europeans have long had a fascination with and sympathy for the Himalayan region and its Buddhist spiritual traditions – and the Dalai Lama is a frequent visitor to the Continent.

This Friday, Europe's foreign ministers meet in Slovenia, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, to adopt a common position on relations with Beijing and "the suffering of Tibet," as French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner describes it.

The question in Slovenia is how to balance appreciation for the progress China has made with concern about the heavy handed tactics of an unelected government that has long eschewed any dialogue with those disagreeing with it. Most European states also have significant business interests in China.

While no European Union state is preparing to boycott the 2008 Games – "Let's not be more Tibetan than the Dalai Lama," who did not advocate boycott, says Mr. Kouchner – there is a general revulsion at the scenes out of Tibet, and at what is seen as an overheated Chinese propaganda effort to demonize the Dalai Lama and hold him responsible for violence.

In a clear rebuke to the Chinese position on Dalai Lama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown plans to meet the spiritual leader in May, and the Dalai Lama was invited to speak at a conference in Nantes, France, during the games in August.

As the British Foreign Office issued a human rights report critical of China this week, Mr. Miliband said, "There needs to be mutual respect between all communities and sustained dialogue between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese authorities."

On May 22, the Dalai Lama will give a speech at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

On Wednesday Robert Menard, general secretary of Reporters Sans Frontières in Paris, the journalistic watchdog group, stated that Mr. Sarkozy should boycott the opening if China does not release 30 political prisoners who are on the lists of nearly every human rights group, and if foreign correspondents are continued to be banned from working in Tibet.

Mr. Menard's group raced to unfurl a Tibetan flag at the opening ceremony of the games in Athens this week while a Chinese official was speaking – an act widely criticized in the journalistic community, which has depended on RSF to report on press violations.

Prior to the China-Tibet dissatisfaction in Europe, many protest groups here demanded that China stop its support of the Sudanese government, widely regarded as a main culprit in the starvation and chaos in Darfur. The phrase "Genocide Olympics" has been used in Europe among human rights groups to describe the twinning of the Games with China's policy toward Sudan.

Sudan Agrees to Darfur Peace Talks

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/world/africa/07nations.html

September 7, 2007
Sudan Agrees to Darfur Peace Talks
By WARREN HOGE

KHARTOUM, Sudan, Sept. 6 — The United Nations and Sudan announced Thursday that rebel leaders from Darfur would hold peace negotiations with the government next month to seek an end to a conflict that many in the world contend constitutes genocide.

The talks, under the auspices of the United Nations and the African Union, will begin on Oct. 27 in Tripoli, the capital of Libya.

In a joint statement, the government of Sudan pledged “to contribute positively to secure the environment for the negotiations, fulfilling its commitment to a full cessation of hostilities in Darfur and agreed upon cease-fire.”

Sudan also promised to “facilitate the timely deployment” of the new 26,000-member African Union United Nations peacekeeping force, which it had long resisted but then agreed to this summer under intense international pressure.

The announcement came on the fourth day of an African trip devoted to Darfur by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who declared on taking office in January that ending the killing and pillaging in the war- ravaged area of western Sudan state was his top international priority.

“We have taken a big step toward our shared goal of bringing peace to Darfur and long term development in Sudan,” Mr. Ban said.

Rebel groups and the government have held peace talks before, and a peace agreement was reached with one faction last year. But that has hardly stopped the violence in Darfur, where there are many armed factions of rebels, Arab militias and bandits.

Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, joined him on stage at the outset of the announcement ceremony in Friendship Hall but then left with no comment before Mr. Ban and Lama Akol, the Sudanese foreign minister, formally presented the agreement.

An announcer said that Mr. Bashir’s departure was prearranged so he could go greet an unnamed visiting president

Mr. Ban has been pressing for wide ranging political talks to precede the arrival of the new peacekeeping troops, arguing that “there must be a peace to keep.”. Officials said he had been on the phone with political figures and leaders of neighboring countries in recent days during trips to Juba in southern Sudan and El Fasher in North Darfur.

They said the suggestion of Libya as a venue for the talks came from Mr. Bashir, the Sudanese president, in a private dinner with Mr. Ban Monday night at the presidential guest house in Khartoum.

“We were thrown by the choice at first,” said a United Nations official who said he was not authorized to discuss internal decision-making by name. “But the more we thought about it, the more it made sense as a way to convince the Africans that they would maintain possession of the process.”

He added that Sudan was concerned about rebel arms coming across the Libyan border and saw involving Tripoli as a way of getting it to curb the flow.

Mr. Ban leaves Friday for Chad and is scheduled to see Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, on Saturday in Tripoli.

Mr. Ban said the talks would be supervised by Jan Eliasson, his special representative for Darfur, and Salim A. Salim, the Darfur envoy of the African Union.

The two men have been traveling extensively in the region in recent weeks, trying to bring the fragmented Sudanese rebel movement together so that the groups could take advantage of what the United Nations believes is a new willingness in Khartoum to talk.

A key test of Thursday’s joint proposal will be how many people from the rebel side show up, but Mr. Eliasson said the time was right for taking the initiative.

“The common denominator was that all sides have realized now that there is no military solution,” he said.

Mr. Eliasson noted that Libya had helped in two meetings, in April and July, to convince reluctant rebel leaders, some of whom are based in Tripoli, of the need to seek a political solution. Libya also had the advantages of being close to Sudan, thereby cutting travel costs and assuring a better turnout, he said.

The bloodletting in Darfur began four years ago when ethnic African fighters took up arms against the Arab-dominated central government, accusing Khartoum of hoarding resources and neglecting their area. Khartoum retaliated by unleashing militias in an ethnic cleansing campaign that has ended up costing more than 200,000 lives and leaving 2.5 million villagers homeless.

Washington has called the scorched earth policy genocide. Sudan has denied the accusations and puts the death toll at 9,000.

Mr. Ban said his visit to Darfur Wednesday had “made my resolve stronger and firmer to work for peace and security.”

“I was so shocked and humbled when I visited the I.D.P. camp,” he said. The United Nations calls refugees in their own country internally displaced people.

Several Sudanese questioners Thursday challenged Mr. Ban’s motives in coming here and asked whether he wasn’t taking sides against the government. “The United Nations is not interested in interfering in any way in any internal matters in Sudan,” he said.

Mr. Ban also said that among the invited would be Abdel Wahid al-Nur, an influential rebel leader who is now based in exile in Paris and refused to attend a meeting run by Mr. Eliasson and Mr. Salim last month in Arusha, Tanzania where seven other major rebel figures drew up a framework for sharing power and wealth in any ultimate settlement with the government.

Mr. Akol, the foreign minister, was asked if he wanted to see Mr. al-Nur, a government opponent with a wide following, at the talks. “Great leaders in history are the ones who know when to take the right decision at the right time,” he said.