IslamiCity.org Homepage
Forum Home Forum Home > Regional > Africa
  New Posts New Posts RSS Feed - Darfur’s War of the Future  What is Islam What is Islam  Donate Donate
  FAQ FAQ  Quran Search Quran Search  Forum Search   Events   Register Register  Login Login

Darfur’s War of the Future

 Post Reply Post Reply
Author
Message
Duende View Drop Down
Senior Member
Senior  Member


Joined: 27 July 2005
Status: Offline
Points: 651
Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Duende Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Darfur’s War of the Future
    Posted: 25 September 2006 at 9:57am
I�ve cut and pasted this from the original, which should be
compulsory reading for all. It is high time everybody had their eyes
opened as to the real reasons behind today�s conflicts and began
thinking about their future and their children�s future. The future
depends on decisions we make today, and we should make those
decisions while armed with the truth.

War of the Future
Oil Drives the Genocide in Darfur
By David Mors

A war of the future is being waged right now in the sprawling desert
region of northeastern Africa known as Sudan.

This war is being fought with Kalashnikovs, clubs and knives. In the
western region of Sudan known as Darfur, the preferred tactics are
burning and pillaging, castration and rape -- carried out by Arab
militias riding on camels and horses. The most sophisticated
technologies deployed are, on the one hand, the helicopters used by
the Sudanese government to support the militias when they attack
black African villages, and on the other hand, quite a different
weapon: the seismographs used by foreign oil companies to map oil
deposits hundreds of feet below the surface.

This is a resource war, fought by surrogates, involving great powers
whose economies are predicated on growth, contending for a finite
pool of resources. It is a war straight out of the pages of Michael
Klare's book, Blood and Oil; and it would be a glaring example of the
consequences of our addiction to oil, if it were not also an invisible
war.
Invisible?
Invisible because it is happening in Africa. Invisible because our
mainstream media are subsidized by the petroleum industry. Think
of all the car ads you see on television, in newspapers and
magazines. Think of the narcissism implicit in our automobile
culture, our suburban sprawl, our obsessive focus on the rich and
famous, the giddy assumption that all this can continue indefinitely
when we know it can't -- and you see why Darfur slips into darkness.

Racism enters into our refusal to even try to understand Africa, let
alone value African lives. And yes, surely we're witnessing the kind of
denial that Samantha Power documents in A Problem from Hell:
America and the Age of Genocide; the sheer difficulty we have
acknowledging genocide. Once we acknowledge it, she observes, we
pay lip-service to humanitarian ideals, but stand idly by. And yes,
turmoil in Africa may evoke our experience in Somalia, with its
graphic images of American soldiers being dragged through the
streets by their heels. But all of this is trumped, I believe, by
something just as deep: an unwritten conspiracy of silence that
prevents the media from making the connections that would threaten
our petroleum-dependent lifestyle, that would lead us to
acknowledge the fact that the industrial world's addiction to oil is
laying waste to Africa.

When Darfur does occasionally make the news -- photographs of
burned villages, charred corpses, malnourished children -- it is
presented without context. In truth, Darfur is part of a broader oil-
driven crisis in northern Africa. An estimated 300 to 400 Darfurians
are dying every day. Yet the message from our media is that we
Americans are "helpless" to prevent this humanitarian tragedy, even
as we gas up our SUVs with these people's lives.
Sudan is now the seventh biggest oil producer in Africa after Nigeria,
Libya, Algeria, Angola, Egypt, and Equatorial Guinea.

Oil companies and exploration companies like Halliburton wield
political and sometimes military power. In Sudan, roads and bridges
built by oil firms have been used to attack otherwise remote villages.
Canada's largest oil company, Talisman, is now in court for allegedly
aiding Sudan government forces in blowing up a church and killing
church leaders, in order to clear the land for pipelines and drilling.
Under public pressure in Canada, Talisman has sold its holdings in
Sudan. Lundin Oil AB, a Swedish company, withdrew under similar
pressure from human rights groups

Last June, following the new seismographic exploration in Sudan and
with the new power-sharing peace treaty about to be implemented,
Khartoum and the SPLA signed a flurry of oil deals with Chinese,
Indian, British, Malaysian, and other oil companies.

In short, Sudan embodies a collision between a failed state and a
failed energy policy. Increasingly, ours is a planet whose human
population is devoted to extracting what it can, regardless of the
human and environmental cost. The Bush energy policy, crafted by
oil companies, is predicated on a far different future from the one
any sane person would want his or her children to inherit -- a
desolate world that few Americans, cocooned by the media's silence,
are willing to imagin
www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=14239

More information on the real policy towards Darfur is worth reading
here:

Appeasement Driven by Oil
The Bush Administration and Darfur
By David Morse
www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=124232
Back to Top
Hanan View Drop Down
Senior Member
Senior  Member

Joined: 27 July 2006
Location: Germany
Status: Offline
Points: 1035
Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hanan Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 26 September 2006 at 10:48am

Thank you Duende for posting the article. No one can say that they didn't know about this genocide. I remember that Christiane Amanpour (CNN) once said that she still feels very guilty for not giving enough attention to the Ruandan genocide and that this will always bother her conscience. Here, once again, Amanpour and other are silent, except for occasional glimpses when Hollywood people make a five minute fuss about it. What is wrong here? I don't understand it. Can we really live with the knowledge that we've supported Haliburton, the Canadians and Americans and others in the genocide of the people of Darfur?

The African Union will add 4,000 troops to its mission in Darfur, bringing the number of police and soldiers to 11,000. Sudan has refused to allow a U.N. peacekeeping force into the region. Approximately 200,000 people have died since violence flared in 2003. http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNew s&storyid=2006-09-25T144844Z_01_L24821179_RTRUKOC_0_US-S UDAN.xml&src=rss

Back to Top
Hayfa View Drop Down
Senior Member
Senior  Member
Avatar
Female
Joined: 07 June 2005
Location: United States
Status: Offline
Points: 2368
Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hayfa Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 22 October 2006 at 7:28pm
May we send prayers out to the people of Darfur.
When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy. Rumi
Back to Top
mariyah View Drop Down
Senior Member
Senior  Member
Avatar

Joined: 29 March 2006
Status: Offline
Points: 1283
Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote mariyah Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 22 October 2006 at 7:36pm

Asalaamu alaikum,

 Thank you so much for this article sister Duende. I pray that this post finds you and your family in good health. I personally know some of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan and have heard their stories of the tragedy and degradation that many of the peoples of Darfur and Sudan are suffering because of the greed of a few. We have many refugees from both Somalia and Sudan that have resettled in southern Arizona: many of them go into healthcare in order to support themselves, so I am often their supervisor. These people are warm and loving and I cannot understand on earth why anyone would harm them!

 

 

"Every good deed is charity whether you come to your brother's assistance or just greet him with a smile.
Back to Top
candid View Drop Down
Senior Member
Senior Member

Joined: 16 February 2006
Status: Offline
Points: 211
Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote candid Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05 November 2006 at 10:32pm
Thank you Duende for the article.
Back to Top
 Post Reply Post Reply
  Share Topic   

Forum Jump Forum Permissions View Drop Down

Forum Software by Web Wiz Forums® version 12.03
Copyright ©2001-2019 Web Wiz Ltd.