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A lost soul in a crazy unbalanced world...

*rubbing hands excitedly*
oooooooo Just let me Finish these midterms so I can lay whats on my mind be mazaaaaaaaj!
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He deals the cards as a meditation, and those he plays never suspect. He doesnt play for the money he wins, he doesnt play for respect. He deals the cards to find the answer, a sacred geometry of chance, a hidden law of a probable outcome. The numbers lead a dance. I know that the spades are the swords of soldiers, I know that the clubs are weapons of war, I know that diamonds mean many for this art.
Thats not the shape of my heart

Jinkess, thank you for your valuable input.

Lately, I haven't been following the Darfur news,however; I'm starting to believe, like many of your friends have stated, that the Western media is blowing it out of proportion.One day they call it a genocide, the next day they don't (http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article20182)
Via http://www.bloggingjuba.blogspot.com/

A lot of fishy info is being portrayed in the media.

So, what can we do to remedy the situation?

Raise awareness- but then why would anyone in the other regions of Sudan care about Darfur when he/she has enough up his/her sleeves with trying to make ends meet?

On the other hand, hasn't the CPA been achieved via Western pressure? though not a complete success.

Sry, I'm good at asking questions but not at answering them.

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"Somewhere in the incunabulum of time the New Year lay awaiting birth. Outside, in the dark, and with none to call it friend, the old year was fading into death"

For me the fluctuating death/refugee figures have become a blur... and honestly... I dont give a damn for them.
I dont give a damn for the genocide v. tribal conflict.
I dont give a damn for the stupid campaign to 'stop buying coke products because they help Supply the Janjaweed'
And I certainly dont give a damn for those that defend the Bashir Crooks just because they feel they are being unrepesented, misunderstood, a little confused or tortured over their identity and ethnicity.
Bottom Line is


People are dying


Just that should invoke Something!!!!
Damn it Anything!!!
from the first 10 to the escalating 1,000 through 10,000... when do we start saying 'Oh damn... thats alot of dead'
Lakin for people to sit and come up with all these elaborate schemes of how Israel and the U.S.A. are secretly plotting to take over Sudan and it's Oil is just insiginificant... absrud... Plain Idiotic!
Instead of wasting time using all that brain power to come up with reasons NOT to take action... ya*7y come up with solutions!

I cant help but feel it's as if our pride is holding us back.. this notion it's us against them... The western World versus our way of solving everything... kind of like this new wave of popularity in female circumcision... 'So the West say it's not safe and we listen to them! Well F' them... they are trying to colonize us and blah blah blah. I'll go back to practicing this highly fatal tradition just so I can snub my nose to the west and say.. you cant Change/Convert me!'

Ba3dain I dont care if every news channel, politician, activist says 'Darfur is not a Genocide, it is not Arab v. Black, etc. etc.' Refute all those terrible exagerrated numbers... and Still... Sudan would not do a damn thing.
Why is that?
Why Care what They say!?!
I live here in the U.S.
I get bogged down with all these questions of 'Why are you killing Africans?'
And yes I come to question my Identity
Lakin that doesnt matter
It never mattered
Right now is not the time for me to worry about educating that uni kid about what is Really Going on in Darfur... I can always do that later
Right now is the time for me to say enough is enough... call it whatever you want what is going on in Darfur... But it must
Stop
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He deals the cards as a meditation, and those he plays never suspect. He doesnt play for the money he wins, he doesnt play for respect. He deals the cards to find the answer, a sacred geometry of chance, a hidden law of a probable outcome. The numbers lead a dance. I know that the spades are the swords of soldiers, I know that the clubs are weapons of war, I know that diamonds mean many for this art.
Thats not the shape of my heart

Very well said! Bottom line is it must STOP but the question is, how do we make it stop if a political solution is required when most of us don't have a say in the Sudanese political scene?

I believe the media played a big role in alienating the Sudanese people more than it has done to help resolve this situation because at the end of the day it's only Sudanese that can bring about a true and lasting solution.

Today Darfur seems more like a county of its own, so to many this is not a SUDANESE problem better yet it is a fabricated problem created by the West. I agree throwing blame and crying wolf will not help anyone and many need to stop whining and actually get on the ground and help create change. But that can not come about unless there is a genuine understanding of the problem itself.

Asking questions is a good thing because they help us in understanding what is going on around us, but how long must we ask these questions in order for us to formulate a response?

I guess the number of views this topic so far has received to the number of those that actually replied is a good example to why many of our youth know there is a problem but yet they don't even weigh in their opinion. It's a very good reflection of what is actually going on in Sudan, they know there is a problem but choose to turn their heads the other way round...
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A lost soul in a crazy unbalanced world...

Naj, well-said.

So, what now?
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"Somewhere in the incunabulum of time the New Year lay awaiting birth. Outside, in the dark, and with none to call it friend, the old year was fading into death"

I wish we can read some more opinions....


Anyone?
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A lost soul in a crazy unbalanced world...

i hope to voice my opinion on this but a bit busy at the moment. hopefully tomorrow.

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"I try."

Quote:

To me, there seems to be a disconnect between awareness, crafting a resolution, and execution.

Precisely!
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"Somewhere in the incunabulum of time the New Year lay awaiting birth. Outside, in the dark, and with none to call it friend, the old year was fading into death"

thank you jinkess for starting this topic, this darfur issue goes through my head every single day! i cant escape it..its on tv, its in newspapers, its on many posters and banners around the uni, a few weeks ago a 'refugee' from darfur gave a speech at the uni, there is going to be a talk by some top international war crimes guy soon about it, then on top of that my friends and anyone who knows im sudanese feels the need to ask me 'what the hell is going on in ur country!!', i dont have a convincing answer for them.

Quote:

To me, there seems to be a disconnect between awareness, crafting a resolution, and execution.

this above point is exactly true! but until the facts are out in the open then crafting a resolution is impossible, you cant judge on a case where the perpetrators are unknown and the crime is not clearly defined.

As mentioned we know there are refugee camps with thousands and thousands of innocents and some people have been killed. People accuse the government of genocide etc, they constantly deny it, i personally dont think they are directly responsible, BUT i believe they are guilty of neglect, how is it possible to let such a thing happen in your country that YOU are ruling??


Another thing about Sudan, because the country is sooo massive then you can easily carry on life oblivious to any crisis in another part of the country. When i visit Sudan in the holidays its just like normal, this was the same during the civil war in the south, people still chilling in Khartoum 2, people partying, weddings taking place, new constructions all over khartoum and so on. If people are living happily and not really pressuring government then what do we expect to happen..

The people who 'pull the strings' in Sudan, live in comfortable housing which is in affluent suburbs in the capital city, a city which is convieniently in the centre of the country far from these problems. As long as those people are content and getting richer then i guess........sudan will continue as it is.

As a child i was thinking Sudan was a wonderful place, slowly as you get older u start to see things and you realise sadly it was like an illusion...sudan is just another african country, corrupt, unjust and full of tragedy. (I still luv it though)

jinkess great topic. i really like what you had to say and what the others have added as well, alot of the points that i would have made i am glad to see have been pointed out and just to point one thing out that you said, about the Afro/ Arab idea, again I think this is just an idea pointed out just to seperate ppl and creat more tension b/w them, and that the heart of the problem lies much deeper then the colour of our skin or the language we speak.

Also i wanted to say that i really beleive that the ones that should be held completely resposible for this conflict are the members of the government, i mean they are the only ones that have a say in anything that goes on in Sudan, no one else can voice opnions publicly without being attacked. and this sort of dectatorship has been going on long before Daurfur, and sadly it has become a part of our history.

I really hope we see a change sooner then later.
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"They say, 'You are a savage and dangerous woman.' I said, 'I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.' "

Sorry guys I've been away for sometime... internet access and stuff... I've read your responces and I'll be replying very soon... bare with me
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A lost soul in a crazy unbalanced world...

This is a related article I found online...

Darfur: The Real Roots of Darfur
From The Atlantic

To truly understand the crisis in Darfur-and it has been profoundly misunderstood-you need to look back to the mid-1980s, before the violence between African and Arab began to simmer. Alex de Waal, now a program director at the Social Science Research Council, was there at that time, as a doctoral candidate doing anthropological fieldwork. Earlier this year, he told me a story that, he says, keeps coming back to him. De Waal was traveling through the dry scrub of Darfur, studying indigenous reactions to the drought that gripped the region. In a herders' camp near the desert's border, he met with a bedridden and nearly blind Arab sheikh named Hilal Abdalla, who said he was noticing things he had never seen before: Sand blew into fertile land, and the rare rain washed away alluvial soil. Farmers who had once hosted his tribe and his camels were now blocking their migration; the land could no longer support both herder and farmer. Many tribesmen had lost their stock and scratched at millet farming on marginal plots. The God-given order was broken, the sheikh said, and he feared the future. "The way the world was set up since time immemorial was being disturbed," recalled de Waal. "And it was bewildering, depressing. And the consequences were terrible." In 2003, another scourge, now infamous, swept across Darfur. Janjaweed fighters in military uniforms, mounted on camels and horses, laid waste to the region. In a campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting Darfur's blacks, the armed militiamen raped women, burned houses, and tortured and killed men of fighting age. Through whole swaths of the region, they left only smoke curling into the sky. At their head was a 6-foot-4 Arab with an athletic build and a commanding presence. In a conflict the United States would later call genocide, he topped the State Department's list of suspected war criminals. De Waal recognized him: His name was Musa Hilal, and he was the sheikh's son. T he fighting in Darfur is usually described as racially motivated, pitting mounted Arabs against black rebels and civilians. But the fault lines have their origins in another distinction, between settled farmers and nomadic herders fighting over failing lands. The aggression of the warlord Musa Hilal can be traced to the fears of his father, and to how climate change shattered a way of life. Until the rains began to fail, the sheikh's people lived amicably with the settled farmers. The nomads were welcome passers-through, grazing their camels on the rocky hillsides that separated the fertile plots. The farmers would share their wells, and the herders would feed their stock on the leavings from the harvest. But with the drought, the farmers began to fence off their land-even fallow land-for fear it would be ruined by passing herds. A few tribes drifted elsewhere or took up farming, but the Arab herders stuck to their fraying livelihoods-nomadic herding was central to their cultural identity. (The distinction between "Arab" and "African" in Darfur is defined more by lifestyle than any physical difference: Arabs are generally herders, Africans typically farmers. The two groups are not racially distinct.) The name Darfur means "Land of the Fur" (the largest single tribe of farmers in Darfur), but the vast region holds the tribal lands-the dars-of many tribes. In the late 1980s, landless and increasingly desperate Arabs began banding together to wrest their own dar from the black farmers. In 1987, they published a manifesto of racial superiority, and clashes broke out between Arabs and Fur. About 3,000 people, mostly Fur, were killed, and hundreds of villages and nomadic camps were burned before a peace agreement was signed in 1989. More fighting in the 1990s entrenched the divisions between Arabs and non-Arabs, pitting the Arab pastoralists against the Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit farmers. In these disputes, Sudan's central government, seated in Khartoum, often supported the Arabs politically and sometimes provided arms. In 2003, a rebellion began in Darfur-a reaction against Khartoum's neglect and political marginalization of the region. And while the rebels initially sought a pan-ethnic front, the schism between those who opposed the government and those who supported it broke largely on ethnic lines. Even so, the conflict was rooted more in land envy than in ethnic hatred. "Interestingly, most of the Arab tribes who have their own land rights did not join the government's fight," says David Mozersky, the International Crisis Group's project director for the Horn of Africa. W hy did Darfur's lands fail? For much of the 1980s and '90s, environmental degradation in Darfur and other parts of the Sahel (the semi-arid region just south of the Sahara) was blamed on the inhabitants. Dramatic declines in rainfall were attributed to mistreatment of the region's vegetation. Imprudent land use, it was argued, exposed more rock and sand, which absorb less sunlight than plants, instead reflecting it back toward space. This cooled the air near the surface, drawing clouds downward and reducing the chance of rain. "Africans were said to be doing it to themselves," says Isaac Held, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But by the time of the Darfur conflict four years ago, scientists had identified another cause. Climate scientists fed historical sea-surface temperatures into a variety of computer models of atmospheric change. Given the particular pattern of ocean-temperature changes worldwide, the models strongly predicted a disruption in African monsoons. "This was not caused by people cutting trees or overgrazing," says Columbia University's Alessandra Giannini, who led one of the analyses. The roots of the drying of Darfur, she and her colleagues had found, lay in changes to the global climate. The extent to which those changes can be blamed on human activities remains an open question. Most scientists agree that greenhouse gases have warmed the tropical and southern oceans. But just how much artificial warming-as opposed to natural drifts in oceanic temperatures-contributed to the drought that struck Darfur is as debatable as the relationship between global warming and the destruction of New Orleans. "Nobody can say that Hurricane Katrina was definitely caused by climate change," says Peter Schwartz, the co-author of a 2003 Pentagon report on climate change and national security. "But we can say that climate change means more Katrinas. For any single storm, as with any single drought, it's difficult to say. But we can say we'll get more big storms and more severe droughts." With countries across the region and around the world suffering similar pressures, some see Darfur as a canary in the coal mine, a foretaste of climate-driven political chaos. Environmental degradation "creates very dry tinder," says de Waal. "So if anyone wants to put a match to it, they can light it up." Combustion might be particularly likely in areas where the political or social geography is already fragile. "Climate change is likely to cause tension all over the world," says Idean Salehyan, a political scientist at the University of North Texas. Whether or not it sparks conflict, he says, depends on the strength, goodwill, and competence of local and national governments. In Darfur itself, recognizing climate change as a player in the conflict means seeking a solution beyond a political treaty between the rebels and the government. "One can see a way of de-escalating the war," says de Waal. "But unless you get at the underlying roots, it'll just spring back." One goal of the internationally sponsored peace process is the eventual return of locals to their land. But what if there's no longer enough decent land to go around? To create a new status quo, one with the moral authority of the God-given order mourned by Musa Hilal's father, local leaders would have to put aside old agreements and carve out new ones. Lifestyles and agricultural practices would likely need to change to accommodate many tribes on more fragile land. Widespread investment and education would be necessary. But with Khartoum uncooperative, creating the conditions conducive to these sorts of solutions would probably require not only forceful foreign intervention but also a long-term stay. Environmental degradation means the local authorities have little or no surplus to use for tribal buy-offs, land deals, or coalition building. And fighting makes it nearly impossible to rethink land ownership or management. "The first thing you've got to do is stop the carnage and allow moderates to come to the fore," says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the University of Toronto. Yet even once that happens, he admits, "these processes can take decades." Among the implications arising from the ecological origin of the Darfur crisis, the most significant may be moral. If the region's collapse was in some part caused by the emissions from our factories, power plants, and automobiles, we bear some responsibility for the dying. "This changes us from the position of Good Samaritans-disinterested, uninvolved people who may feel a moral obligation-to a position where we, unconsciously and without malice, created the conditions that led to this crisis," says Michael Byers, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia. "We cannot stand by and look at it as a situation of discretionary involvement. We are already involved."
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A lost soul in a crazy unbalanced world...

Quote:

So my question to you is how do you put an end to this tragedy? How can the average, concerned Sudanese, who most often lacks political if not civil rights, aid in bringing about an end to the crisis in darfur and through what means? Awareness is one part of the solution but can only do so much; so does financial assistance.... so what next? To me, there seems to be a disconnect between awareness, crafting a resolution, and execution. I guess my question is how do we take it to the next level??

Good points u got there.
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Endlessly Thinking About....