I originally wrote Silent Voices of Millions,
but today it is BILLIONS of People
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Assessment of Darfur at the United Nations by John Holmes- Critical Gaps
Uploaded by unitednations
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United Nations, 24 March 2009 - John Holmes, the Emergency Relief Coordinator and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, is providing an update on the humanitarian situation in Sudan. United Nations humanitarian officials today commended the cooperation of Sudanese Government staff on an assessment of relief needs in war-torn Darfur, while they warned of high risks ahead following the ouster of crucial aid groups.
Read the article from the United Naions www.un.org
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Sudan's aid crisis deepens in Darfur
Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish
Posted March 24, 2009
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UNMIS, the UN mission in Sudan says the humanitarian situation in Darfur has worsened since Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, ordered the expulsion of foreign aid organisations from his country.
Al Jazeera's Hashem Ahelbarra reports from the southern part of Darfur where an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty has surfaced for UN peacekeepers struggling to maintain some stability in the troubled region.
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Crime Plagues Lives of Darfur refugees
Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish
Posted March 23, 2009
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The African-UN peacekeeping mission in Sudan's Darfur region is struggling to provide adequate protection.
The joint African Union-United Nations Mission in Darfur (Unamid) is under-resourced and unable to cope in the war-stricken region in western Sudan.
Al Jazeera's Hashem Ahelbarra joined a Unamid team on patrol in South Darfur and sent this special report.
More than a million people in Darfur will go without food rations by May unless new aid agencies are deployed, a joint Sudanese-UN assessment says.
It also says there could be major water shortages within two weeks.
The warning follows Sudan's expulsion of 13 large foreign aid agencies, mostly from Darfur.
Mr Bashir accuses them of spying for the International Criminal Court, which has issued an arrest warrant against him for alleged war crimes in Darfur.
Four of the expelled non-governmental organisations (NGOs) served some 1.1 million people, the report released on Tuesday said.
The assessment team toured Darfur from 11-19 March, and the report was co-signed by UN and Sudanese officials.
'Band-aid solutions'
UN humanitarian affairs coordinator Ameerah Haq told journalists in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum that "the most critical needs are being filled for now".
"However, by the beginning of May, as the hunger gap approaches, and unless the World Food Programme has found partners able to take on the mammoth distribution task, these people will not receive their rations," she said.
The assessment also warned that "major water shortages could develop within two to four weeks, as from March 18, if fuel, incentives and spare parts are not continuously provided."
Since the expulsion of aid agencies, Sudan has said Sudanese groups have been filling the gaps, denying that there is any problem with the distribution of aid.
Read the full article: bbc....................................................
There's Still a Genocide of (unarmed) Darfuri families by their own government since 2003
Uploaded by savedarfurcoalition
The United States has a moral obligation anytime you see humanitarian catastrophes.. we have the most stake in creating an order in the world that is stable...and when you see a genocide whether it's in Rwanda, or Bosnia or in Darfur - that's a stain on all of us, that's a stain on our souls.... We can't say 'never again' and then allow it to happen again and as President of the United States I don't intend to abandon people or turn a blind eye to slaughter… I was the first along with Senator Brownback to focus on ratcheting up sanctions and getting an envoy in there who was serious. We worked diligently to get the Darfur Peace and Accountability act passed…I think the level of commitment and the way that I’ve spoken out on this issue indicates not only knowledge but also passion in bringing an end to this crisis. It’s very encouraging to see activism based not on self-interest but on moral imperative…We can't say 'never again' and then allow it to happen again and as President of the United States I don't intend to abandon people or turn a blind eye to slaughter.” November 2007 Hear Barack Obama say these words.
Now that he is President, leadership based on his own words is yet to happen regarding Darfur. We still need a President to show the political will to find ways that result in ending the crimes that define genocide.
Genocide never has happened without the complicity of the rest of the world. And it never happens at a convenient time, i.e. when we have an opening in our schedule to fit it in to our list of things to do.
The World Population Chooses Silence
Perpetrators of genocide - how do they become this way?
I find Alice Miller's writings help reason through how our childhoods affect how we act the rest of our lives....
The feeling child
Interview with Alice Miller by Diane Connors for OMNI Publications International March 1987
Source: alice-miller.com/interviews
...Alice Miller's stories portray abused and silenced children who later become destructive to themselves and to others. Adolf Hitler, says Miller, was such a child. Constantly mistreated by his father, emotionally abandoned by his mother, he learned only cruelty; he learned to be obedient and to accept daily punishments with unquestioning compliance. After years, he took revenge. As an adult he once said, "It gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware people are of what is really happening to them."
(In The Truth Will Set You Free - she describes more about Hitler's childhood and its relation to his adult behavior.)
Miller, famed throughout Europe, wrote of Hitler's childhood in For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and The Roots of Violence. In the same work she lets Christiane F. tell her own story: "I had trouble telling the letters H and K apart One evening my mother was taking great pains to explain the difference to me. I could scarcely pay attention to what she was saying because I noticed my father getting more and more furious. I always knew what was going to happen. He went out and got the hand broom and gave me a trouncing. Now I was supposed to tell the difference between H, and K. Of course by that time I didn't know anything anymore, so I got another licking and was sent to bed." Christiane went into the street and became a drug addict.
"We do not need books about psychology in order to learn to respect our children," Miller says. "What we need is a total revision of the methods of child rearing and our traditional view about it.
The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our lives: with cruelty or with tenderness and protection. We often impose our most agonizing suffering upon ourselves and, later, on our children."
In 1979 Miller's first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, was published in Germany. First titled Prisoners of Childhood, its three short essays described how parents project their feelings, ideas, and dreams upon their children. To survive and be loved, a child learns to obey. In repressing his or her feelings, the child stifles attempts to be herself or himself. The result, said Miller, is all too often depression, ebbing of vitality, the loss of self......Miller uses the phrase "poisonous pedagogy" to describe what we inflict on children "for their own good" out of our hypocrisy and ignorance. She perceives that we instill humiliation, shame, fear, and guilt as we are "training" children. By encouraging conformity, suppressing curiosity and emotions, a parent reduces a child's ability to make crucial perceptions in later life. "Children are tolerant. They learn intolerance from us." ......
How do you deal with pain in the healing process?
Pain is the way to the truth. By denying that you were unloved as a child, you spare yourself some pain, but you are not with your own truth. And throughout your whole life you'll try to earn love. In therapy, avoiding pain causes blockage. Yet nobody can confront being neglected or hated without feeling guilty. "It is my fault that my mother is cruel," he thinks. "I made my mother furious; what can I do to make her loving?" So he will continue trying to make her love him. The guilt is really protection against the terrible realization that you are fated to have a mother who cannot love. This is much more painful than to think, "Oh, she is a good mother, it's only me who's bad." Because then you can try to do something to get love. But it's not true; you cannot earn love. And feeling guilty for what has been done to you only supports your blindness and your neurosis.
There are some treatments where the patients cry a lot -- they really suffer -- but do not talk. I saw a videocassette where for one hour the patient relived the pain of birth but didn't talk about it. Only later did he report on what he had felt. But in my opinion it is important to speak, to verbalize, during the experience of pain. Even if the patient felt as if he were in the womb, he should try to talk to the mother and tell her how he feels. The link between feelings and their verbal expression is crucial to the healing process. But he can't do it without assistance; he has to know someone is there who understands how he feels, who supports and confirms him. If a child has been molested and the therapist doesn't deny this fact, many things can open up in the patient. The therapist must not preach forgiveness, or the patient will repress the pain. He won't change, and the repressed rage will look for a scapegoat..
In The Drama you connect repressed feeling with loss of vitality. Was that your experience here?
Yes, experiencing the pain of my life gave me back my vitality. First pain, then vitality. The price of repressing feelings is depression. I also had to resist the usual way of learning. If you are forced to do something, you cannot have fun. But for me, having fun is the first condition of creativity...What advice would you give today to a therapist in training?
First try to discover your own childhood, then take the experience seriously. Listen to the patient and not to any theory; with your theory you are not free to listen. Forget it. Do not analyze the patient like an object. Try to feel, and help the patient to feel instead of talking to the patient about the feelings of others.
The child needs fantasies to survive, to not suffer. Believe what the patient tells you, and don't forget that repressed reality is always worse than a fantasy. No one invents traumas, because we don't need traumas in order to survive. But neither do we need their denial. Some of us pay with severe symptoms for this denial. Study the history of childhood. Therapy has to open you as well as the patient for feeling in your whole life. It has to awaken you from a sleep.
It is tragic to go to therapy and find, instead of help, confusion. I have a letter from a seventy-nine-year-old woman saying that for "forty years of my life I went to psychoanalysis. I saw eight analysts. But for the first time, after reading your book, I didn't feel guilty for what happened to me. I always tried, and the analysts were nice people. They wanted to help me. But they never doubted that my parents were good to me. I am so grateful now that I don't feel guilty since I read your books. I now see how terribly they abused me. It was first my parents and then my analysts who made me feel wrong and guilty." This insight came from a seventy-nine-year-old woman! Then she quoted from the last line of For Your Own Good: "For the human spirit is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath."
Does TV violence affect children?
Children who have really been loved and protected will not be interested in these films and shows and will not be in danger. But the child who was hurt and humiliated -- maybe at school, not necessarily by his parents -- is looking for outcomes, for material; he is looking for an object to hate and on whom to take revenge. Of course there are people who make a business of the suffering of children. But the violence doesn't come from TV films. Its sources are deeper. Protected and loved children cannot become murderers. It is impossible to find one person who was not beaten who beats a child.
Why does violence beget itself through the generations?
If you go back you can see that the abuser was always abused. But in most cases you will not hear it from him or her, because there is so much denial. If you go to a prison and ask a murderer, "How was your childhood?" he will say, "Oh, it was not so bad. My father was severe and he punished me because I was so bad. And my mother was a nice woman." This is the problem: You can't find the truth because the person, the murderer himself, will prevent you from seeing his cruel childhood as it actually was. Because he cannot bear that pain, he kills innocent people instead of feeling the pain of his childhood...
Read the entire interview: alice-miller.com/interviews~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bashir to Visit Egypt Tomorrow?
Egyptian government officials say Sudan's president will visit the country on Wednesday despite an international court's order for his arrest on war crimes charges in the Darfur region.
President Bashir took his first trip abroad to Eritrea on Monday. As John Norris wrote, it is "difficult to see how this serves the Eritrean national interest over the long-term." What will Egypt gain from extending this invitation to Bashir?
AP noted that the Egyptian officials announced Bashir's trip on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to release the information. We'll keep you posted if and when the Egyptian government officially confirms the visit.
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Dear President Obama - A Letter Sent March 12, 2009
Uploaded by ilovemylifesblog
Write President Obama
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
You can also call or write to the President:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Comments to President Obama:
202-456-1111
or
1-800-GENOCIDE
The White House comment line is available
9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. weekdays
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Find USA elected politicians contact information at this link:
www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml
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