War In Darfur Quotes

In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.

They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.

For most of my life, I would have automatically said that I would opt for conscientious objector status, and in general, I still would. But the spirit of the question is would I ever, and there are instances where I might. If immediate intervention would have circumvented the genocide in Rwanda or stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur, would I choose pacifism? Of course not. Scott Simon, the reporter for National Public Radio and a committed lifelong Quaker, has written that it took looking into mass graves in former Yugoslavia to convince him that force is sometimes the only option to deter our species' murderous impulses. While we're on the subject of the horrors of war, and humanity's most poisonous and least charitable attributes, let me not forget to mention Barbara Bush (that would be former First Lady and presidential mother as opposed to W's liquor-swilling, Girl Gone Wild, human ashtray of a daughter. I'm sorry, that's not fair. I've no idea if she smokes.) When the administration censored images of the flag-draped coffins of the young men and women being killed in Iraq - purportedly to respect "the privacy of the families" and not to minimize and cover up the true nature and consequences of the war - the family matriarch expressed her support for what was ultimately her son's decision by saying on Good Morning America on March 18, 2003, "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? I mean it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" Mrs. Bush is not getting any younger. When she eventually ceases to walk among us we will undoubtedly see photographs of her flag-draped coffin. Whatever obituaries that run will admiringly mention those wizened, dynastic loins of hers and praise her staunch refusal to color her hair or glamorize her image. But will they remember this particular statement of hers, this "Let them eat cake" for the twenty-first century? Unlikely, since it received far too little play and definitely insufficient outrage when she said it. So let us promise herewith to never forget her callous disregard for other parents' children while her own son was sending them to make the ultimate sacrifice, while asking of the rest of us little more than to promise to go shopping. Commit the quote to memory and say it whenever her name comes up. Remind others how she lacked even the bare minimum of human integrity, the most basic requirement of decency that says if you support a war, you should be willing, if not to join those nineteen-year-olds yourself, then at least, at the very least, to acknowledge that said war was actually going on. Stupid fucking cow.

This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias.

There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture' or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both 'relevant' and 'contemporary' while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus—I paraphrase only slightly—'Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.' A pundit like (say) Bob Herbert would be utterly lost if he could not pull off such an apparently pleasing and brilliant 'irony.

I knew nothing. Now I've seen what a raw deal lots of other people like Krystal get. And it's not their fault. Not their choice. People don't get to choose what body they're put into. Like, people get born into bodies in the middle of a genocide war in Darfur, and they don't get to worry about how tall they are or whether they'll ever be able to row. They're too busy worrying about how they're going to stay alive for another day.

In our twenty-first century world, the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" sit uneasily in the mind, associated with some of our darkest and most disturbing thoughts about human nature. They conjure Darfur, Serbia, Cambodia, and Pol Pot, and, most vividly of all for many of us, the horrors in Europe before and during World War II. "Species cleansing," on the other hand, is not a term that falls readily to hand, although we have engaged in it without much remorse for at least 10,000 years and probably more. Be it North American mammoths, driven to annihilation ten millennia ago by bands of a near-professional hunting culture known as Clovis ... to passenger pigeons and ivory-billed woodpeckers ... in twentieth century America, humans are ancient veterans of the art of species cleansing, ...

Often, then, the stories came pouring out, and often they were set before us slowly and quietly like tea. These slow stories were told with understatement that made my eyes and voice fill as I translated; for when people seem to have no emotion remaining for such stories, your own heart must supply it.

In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon describes the scene of Romans fleeing the city of Nisibis in A.D. 363 after it was handed over to the Persians......Gibbon could have been describing a photograph from the 1994 genocide in Rawanda or the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. He could have been describing any number of forced migrations that have occurred all over the world in the last ten years, even the last five. The picture has not changed much since the fourth century.

Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane. With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients? And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, “Iraq was better than expected.”31 That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties.32 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.33 Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration’s particular brand of post-September 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy. It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged.

In genocides rape is most times weaponized by the aggressive side, and the suffering sides to such wickedness are women, old and young. Such actions tear at my core and reveal mankind’s depravity at its worst.

Realization 3. Minds change with events, though usually it takes several in succession. The war in Darfur has not been seen as the drought-driven resource crisis it is. The death of 35,000 in Europe’s heat wave of 2003 was considered an anomaly rather than a window on the future. But more such events will pile up. Cyclone Nargis, which hit Burma in May 2008 and killed over 150,000,

The [Crimean War] victory was bitter sweet for the Ottomans, their weak Islamic realm saved by Christian soldiers. To show his gratitude and keep the West at bay, Sultan Abdulmecid was forced, in measures known as Tanzimat--reform--to centralize his administration, decree absolute equality for all minorities regardless of religion, and allow the Europeans all manner of once-inconceivable liberties. He presented St. Anne's, the Crusader church that had become Saladin's madrassa, to Napoleon III. In March 1855, the Duke of Brabant, the future King Leopold II of Belgium, exploiter of the Congo, was the first European allowed to visit the Temple Mount: its guards--club-wielding Sudanese from Darfur--had to be locked in their quarters for fear they would attack the infidel. In June, Archduke Maximilian, the heir to the Habsburg empire--and ill-fated future Emperor of Mexico--arrived with the officers of his flagship. The Europeans started to build hulking imperial-style Christian edifices in a Jerusalem building boom. Ottoman statesmen were unsettled and there would be a violent Muslim backlash, but, after the Crimean War, the West had invested too much to leave Jerusalem alone.

In our twenty-first-century world, the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" sit uneasily in the mind, associated with some of our darkest and most disturbing thoughts about human nature. They conjure Darfur, Servia, Cambodia and Pol Pot, and most vividly of all for many of us, the horrors in Europe before and during World War II. "Spicies cleansing," on the other hand, is not a term that falls readily to hand, although we have engaged in it without much remorse for at least 10,000 years and probably more.

I couldn’t care less about politics, the culture wars. My only interest is to get people to care about Darfurs and Rwandas.

Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, deserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.

Over the years I forced myself to be creative in how I covered the same scenes over and over. I started shooting refugee camps out of focus, sometimes in abstract ways, to try to reach an audience beyond the typical New York Times readership -- an audience geared more toward the visual arts. As ugly as the conflict was, the protagonists were beautiful, wearing brilliantly colored fabrics and, despite persistent hardships, wide, toothy smiles. The Sudanese were lovely, friendly, resilient people, and I wanted to show that in my work. It seemed paradoxical to try to create beautiful images out of conflict, but I found that my more abstract images of Darfur provoked an unusual response from readers. Suddenly I was getting requests to sell fine-art prints of rebels in a sandstorm or of blurred refugees walking through the desert for several thousand dollars. I was conflicted about making money from images of people who were so desperate, but I thought of all the years I had struggled to make ends meet to be a photographer, and I knew that any money I made from these photos would be invested right back into my work. Trying to convey beauty in war was a technique to try to prevent the reader from looking away or turning the page in response to something horrible. I wanted them to linger, to ask questions.

LYING WARS The war in Iraq grew out of the need to correct an error made by Geography when she put the West’s oil under the East’s sand. But no war is honest enough to confess: “I kill to steal.” “The devil’s shit,” as oil is called by its victims, has caused many wars and will certainly cause many more. In Sudan, for instance, a huge number of people lost their lives between the final years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, in an oil war that disguised itself as an ethnic and religious conflict. Derricks and drills, pipes and pipelines sprouted as if by magic in villages turned to ashes and in fields of ruined crops. In the Darfur region, where the butchery continues, the people, all Muslim, began to hate each other when they discovered there might be oil under their feet. The killing in the hills of Rwanda also claimed to be an ethnic and religious war, even though killers and killed were all Catholics. Hatred, a colonial legacy, stemmed from the time when Belgium decreed that those who raised cattle were Tutsis and those who grew crops were Hutus, and that the Tutsi minority ought to dominate the Hutu majority. In recent years, another multitude lost their lives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the service of foreign companies fighting over coltan. That rare mineral is an essential ingredient in cell phones, computers, microchips, and batteries, all of which are staples of the mass media. The media, however, forgot to mention coltan in their scant coverage of the war.

the problem with statistics is that they don't activate our moral emotions. The depressing numbers leave us cold: our minds can't comprehend suffering on such a massive scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a well but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every year for lack of clean water. And why we donate thousands of dollars to help a single African war orphan featured on the cover of a magazine but ignore widespread genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. As Mother Teresa put it, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will

the only thing that had kept me alive during Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Congo, and Darfur was my inner voice that told me when I had reached my personal limit of fear.