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New news, but all-too-familiar

Thursday, December 6, 2007

The eye-popping somersault by America’s so-called “intelligence community” over Iran’s nuclear weapon plans certainly made news.  Obviously.  It involved change.

 

Frustratingly, equally important information – mainly because it involves no change, merely more of the same old, same old – just doesn’t make news at all.

I’m talking – maybe tediously, for which I don’t apologize – about the all-too-familiar horror of Darfur.

 

Specifically, I mean the still-unchanging fact that the new peacekeeping army designed for that murderously decimated region, the oddly-named “Hybrid” force supposedly made up of 26,000 troops gathered by both the African Union and the United Nations, is simply in no state to do its job. And that new force has only 3 weeks to go before its mission officially starts. (Pictured above left: troops of the existing, largely failed African Union Mission in Sudan, AMIS.)

 

But you have to scour the American media pretty hard to find the current dire situation being reported.

 

The facts are simple. Only a third of the number of troops promised by contributing nations have materialized. The force’s helicopter squad - essential for troop movement and action in this territory the size of Texas and lacking any roadways of substance - now numbers exactly zero, instead of the 24 choppers reckoned by military logistics experts to be needed. None have even been promised. Communications equipment intended for the force’s use has been sent in but is being held up in - believe it or not – Sudanese customs sheds.

 

United Nations peacekeeping officials are (in the main) a realistic, determined - and very often an inventively improvisational crowd of operators. But some are now saying – albeit under the cloak of anonymity, understandably - that this threatens to be the worst peacekeeping operation in the 60-year history of UN peace missions. The worst.

 

I’d like to see more mainstream western coverage of this heart-sinking story, besides raw dispatches from Agence France Presse, EuroNews Wire, and the steady old Associated Press. This stuff may not sound new, but it’s definitely the stuff of news.

 

 

 

**A PODCAST BASED ON THIS COLUMN CAN BE HEARD HERE - via Robin Hood Radio **

 

 

 

MEANWHILE, YOU’D HAVE HAD TO LOOK ACROSS THE ATLANTIC TO SEE NEWS of one American’s contribution to helping Darfur’s victims.

 

Actress Mia Farrow (above right) was the public launcher this week, in London, of a new fund to support survivors of the region’s slaughter, a fund that is to be administered by Britain’s Aegis Trust, an anti-genocide foundation set up by the Holocaust Centre in the English Midlands.

 

Farrow, known of course as a Darfur activist ever since her role as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador took her there three years ago, had some interesting observations on media treatment of Sudan, in the week that British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons mercifully found her way home after being jailed for abuse of Islam – the infamous "Mohammed the Teddy Bear" case.

 

The actress said the teacher’s conviction “demonstrates the palpable insanity and cruelty of that regime, and this is only one woman”.  And she seemed to acknowledge the helpful role of the press: “Imagine what would happen to her out of the public eye”, she asked.

 

At the same time, eyeing journalists fiercely, she complained: "One white woman in peril with a teddy bear has captured more media attention than the past three years of our brothers and sisters in the Darfur region." And just to give a recent historical parallel for the media, she also recalled 1994’s African genocide, in Rwanda. “I look back at what we were doing during the Rwanda situation - and in America we were watching the O J Simpson trial."

 

 

 

LATE BREAKING NEWS FROM THE AXIS-OF-EVIL DESK.  A little-known news agency in the Far East reports some fresh intelligence leaks.

 

These conclusively demonstrate, contradicting the CIA's previous interpretations of available data, that North Korea never really had any nuclear weapons plans, after all.

 

The reputed author of the phrase "Axis of Evil", George W Bush's former speech-writer David Frum, is quoted as saying: "Oops! After Iraq and then Iran, this now looks like three for three".

 

Just kidding. But we can surely wonder, can't we?