Darfur...Civil War, Not Genocide, Ohio Senate Bill 161 and......we are about to take a trip to the cleaners!

From John Curry, September 4, 2007
Subject: Darfur...Civil War, Not Genocide, Ohio Senate Bill 161 and......we are about to take a trip to the cleaners!

Our Colorado retiree friend, Cheryl, takes us back to class with this informative New York Times article re. Darfur. The same Darfur (a region in Sudan) that some in our very own Ohio Senate want us to divest our STRS pension fund monies from to solve Sudan's problems. Some in our Ohio Senate must not believe that the conflict in Sudan is a "civil war" and want us, once again (remember House Bill 151?) to divest our Ohio retirement systems monies and ..... lose millions of dollars in the process! This time, the name of the bill is Senate Bill 161! Here is a link to this bill so that you can see for yourself - [Click here]

Keep this bill in mind and write the sponsors of this bill your feelings about the fleecing of Ohio's public retirement systems in a misguided effort to solve a problem that this bill won't solve! Here is the sponsor and the co-sponsors of this bill which, like HB 151, will "take us to the cleaners" but not clean up the misery in the Sudan. Here is the sponsor and the co-sponsors of this misguided bill:

Senator Jacobson

Cosponsors: Senators Cates, Coughlin, Goodman, Kearney, Mason, Mumper, Padgett

From Cheryl Flagg, September 3, 2007
Subject: Re: Darfur...Civil War, Not Genocide

John, Darfur is engaged in a civil war, Arab against Arab, for limited resources such as land, food, water, and livestock. This is not genocide. Divestment of our pensions funds will not solve this terrible situation and will probably make it worse!!! Now, can we "take our pension funds and go home" and send contributions instead? All these poor people in Darfur need help but it won't come from divestment!! Cheryl

Africa

Chaos in Darfur Rises as Arabs Fight With Arabs

Evelyn Hockstein for The New York Times Halimah Yacob Abdullah, a mother of five, lives in a camp for displaced people near Kas in South Darfur. Her husband was shot in fighting among Arab tribes.

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
New York Times
Published: September 3, 2007

NYALA, Sudan, Aug. 28 — Some of the same Arab tribes accused of massacring civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan are now unleashing their considerable firepower against one another in a battle over the spoils of war that is killing hundreds of people and displacing tens of thousands.

Arab Against Arab

Evelyn Hockstein for The New York Times The static nature of life in El Rouhal, a camp near Kas, is hard for elders of the Terjem tribe, who traditionally roam the land for part of the year.

In the past several months, the Terjem and the Mahria, heavily armed Arab tribes that United Nations officials said raped and pillaged together as part of the region’s notorious janjaweed militias, have squared off in South Darfur, fighting from pickup trucks and the backs of camels. They are raiding each other’s villages, according to aid workers and the fighters themselves, and scattering Arab tribesmen into the same kinds of displacement camps that still house some of their earlier victims. United Nations officials said that thousands of gunmen from each side, including some from hundreds of miles away, were pouring into a strategic river valley called Bulbul, while clashes between two other Arab tribes, the Habanniya and the Salamat, were intensifying farther south.

Darfur’s violence has often been characterized as government-backed Arab tribes slaughtering non-Arab tribes, but this new Arab-versus-Arab dimension seems to be a sign of the evolving complexity of the crisis. What started out four years ago in western Sudan as a rebellion and brutal counterinsurgency has cracked wide open into a fluid, chaotic, confusing free-for-all with dozens of armed groups, a spike in banditry and chronic attacks on aid workers.

United Nations officials said tribal and factional fighting was killing more people than the battles between government and rebel forces, which, except in a few areas, have declined considerably.

Though the recent round of clashes between the splintering groups has not come close to taking as many lives as the thousands who were dying each month during the height of the conflict in 2003 and 2004, many aid officials say they fear that the situation is getting out of control.

“The fragmentation of armed groups is among our major concerns,” said Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Sudan. “This is making the situation even more complex, and more difficult for civilians as well as for humanitarians trying to help them.”

The rising insecurity is spelled out in two color-coded maps taped to Mr. Giuliano’s wall in Khartoum, the capital. One is from May 2006 and has only a few pockets of orange and yellow danger zones. But on the map from this June, the danger zones are everywhere.

United Nations officials say the militias may be jockeying for power and trying to seize turf before the long-awaited hybrid force of United Nations and African Union peacekeepers begins to arrive, perhaps later this year. Today’s battlefields are superimposed on yesterday’s, with the Arab militias killing one another over the same burned villages and stingy riverbeds where so much blood has already been spilled.

Though many Western diplomats and a seemingly endless supply of advocates have blamed the Sudanese government for arming Arab militias in the first place, an accusation the government denies, several independent observers in Sudan said the government was not driving this phase of the conflict.

“The government is no longer arming the janjaweed,” said Col. James Oladipo, the African Union commander in Nyala, in South Darfur. The problem now, he said, is “bandits and factions.”

Some aid workers say Darfur is beginning to resemble Somalia, the world’s longest-running showcase for AK-47-fed chaos. Highwaymen in green camouflage — rebel fighters? local militia? janjaweed? — routinely flag down trucks and drag out passengers, robbing the men and sexually assaulting the women. Newly empowered warlords are exacting taxes. The galaxy of rebel armies — the Greater Sudan Liberation Movement, the Popular Forces Troops, the Sudan Democratic Group, to name a few new arrivals — keeps expanding, and ideology seems to fade away. Despite peace talks among them in early August, the rebels, mostly non-Arabs, are now also battling themselves.

Among Arabs, one of the most egregious examples of the recent infighting happened on the morning of July 31 near Sania Daleibah, in southern Darfur. Terjem leaders said hundreds of Terjem had gathered to bury an important sheik. Then they were suddenly surrounded. It was Mahria tribesmen, and according to United Nations reports and witness accounts, the Mahria opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades and belt-fed machine guns and mowed down more than 60 Terjem.

“It was a massacre,” said Mohammed Yacob Ibrahim Abdelrahman, the top Terjem leader. “By our brothers.”