The Unknown Candidate: Kristof's Crusade Against Genocide

Monday, November 13, 2006

Kristof's Crusade Against Genocide

Nicholas Kristof continues his lone crusade to raise our awareness and our government's courage to end the genocide in Chad and Darfur:

Poisoned Arrows vs. Machine Guns
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

"... The courage of ordinary citizens here offers a pointed contrast to the fecklessness everywhere else. France, the former colonial power here, has troops in both Chad and the Central African Republic — which it seems ready to use primarily to evacuate Europeans as order collapses. (During the Rwandan genocide, France left its local staff to be butchered but took care to evacuate the embassy dog.)

As for the U.S., President Bush has found the courage to do little more than demand that the U.N. do something. Frankly, we should be embarrassed that the mightiest superpower in the history of the world can’t summon the gumption of Chadian peasants with bows and arrows.

Already, the U.N. and the major powers have allowed hundreds of thousands of people to be killed in Darfur. Now they seem equally ready to allow the genocide to spread to a far larger area and cause the collapse of Chad and the Central African Republic...."

Read more.

Non-TimesSelect subscribers click to read Kristof's op ed on Donkey O.D.

Photo credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred. R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Ethnic cleansing spreads to eastern Chad

Oil Strengthens the Sudanese Government
From Khartoum, Tanguy Berthemet explains how new oil wealth and new allies have allowed the Sudanese government to thumb its nose at the UN.