UNITED NATIONS PULLED GEORGE CLOONEY'S SECURITY DUE TO FEAR HE MIGHT CRITICIZE GENOCIDE

"When the people relegated to doing good 'run' from doing good, the rest of us need to pick up the slack." Sandra Hammel
See below *

"The United States has a moral obligation anytime you see humanitarian catastrophes..." Barack Obama
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Barack Obama answers the Save Darfur Coalition about his plan to end the genocide in Darfur
Posted on November 26, 2007 by savedarfurcoalition

"...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...

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 a moral imperative. And it's especially heartening to see the young people engaged in expressing their idealism through this movement.

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."

A mother and her child crossing a river. They are among the thousands of displaced people seeking refuge in Dogdoré, Chad. Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

"HERE IN A DARFUR REFUGEE CAMP"
posted by Ann Curry February 18, 2009
Source
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Link to video at MSNBC
1:32

Clooney, Curry keep hope for Darfur

Look for more of George Clooney's videos this weekend on www.nightly.msnbc.com

EN ROUTE TO DARFUR AND THINKING OF THE VICTIMS

Posted: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 1:41 a.m. by Daily Nightly Editor

by Ann Curry, NBC News

SOMEWHERE IN CHAD -- Our NBC News team has landed in Africa and is again heading to the edge of Darfur, gearing up to report a pivotal moment in this tragedy.

Anytime now the International Criminal Court will announce whether to issue an arrest warrant for the President of Sudan for the atrocities in Darfur, a region of Sudan.

About six years after a war between the government of Sudan and a rebel group unleashed systematic rapes, mass killings, and the burning of hundreds of villages, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions are still waiting in camps in Sudan and Chad, waiting for hope and justice.

As our news team moves from planes to vans toward this world of desperation, I think of a woman named Myriam, who survived the burning of her village called Tamajour, just two days before we found her under a tree. Her 5-year-old daughter was traumatized and refusing to eat. When we took her back to her village to salvage what she could, it was still smoldering. The only life she had ever known was in ashes.

I think of Khamis, 13-year-old orphaned when his mother was killed and his father was lost in an attack. When we last saw him, he was a boy alone, surviving on his wits and the kindness of others in a refugee camp. Still he was able to be a good student in the camp's school.

I think of Aziza, raped as a virgin at 17, by an Arab wearing a Sudanese uniform. She said he first wanted to know what tribe she belonged to. He told her, "You are black. You have no place here. We will push you out of here. This land will remain for us." Then he grabbed her tightly and raped her, biting her arm and neck to mark her a victim of rape.

In the hospital, we found elderly Gida Zakaria, severely burned when her thatched roof was set on fire. White gauze was wrapped around her slender body. She told us her husband couldn't move fast enough and was burned to death.

Caption for photo just above: Six-year-old Khalid (left) recovers at a hospital after a Janjaweed attack, flanked by his mother and sister. Click here to see more photography by the NBC News team and Ann Curry during a 2006 trip.

In a nearby room, a young man lay motionless, both his eyes bayoneted. At his side, his wife was weeping and his children sat stunned.

The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has argued Sudan's President Omar al Bashir masterminded genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur and should be brought to justice.

What will the court decide? And what do the victims have to say about it?

Who more deserves a voice than the victims of atrocities?

Ann Curry will be filing reports for Nightly News, TODAY, and msnbc.com this week. Click here to read her 2006 blog entries.

Source: nightly.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/02/17

Ann Curry on twitter

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Op-Ed Columnist

Trailing George Clooney

Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

Children playing in a lake outside Dogdoré, Chad. This town on the Darfur border has become a refuge for thousands of people fleeing violence in the area.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: February 18, 2009

I was going to begin this column with a 13-year-old Chadian boy crippled by a bullet in his left knee, but my hunch is that you might be more interested in hearing about another person on the river bank beside the boy: George Clooney.

Mr. Clooney flew in with me to the little town of Dogdoré, along the border with Darfur, Sudan, to see how the region is faring six years after the Darfur genocide began. Mr. Clooney figured that since cameras follow him everywhere, he might as well redirect some of that spotlight to people who need it more.

It didn’t work perfectly: No paparazzi showed up. But, hey, it has kept you reading at least this far into yet another hand-wringing column about Darfur, hasn’t it?

So I’ll tell you what. You read my columns about Darfur from this trip, and I’ll give you the scoop on every one of Mr. Clooney’s wild romances and motorcycle accidents in this remote nook of Africa. You’ll read it here way before The National Enquirer has it, but only if you wade through paragraphs of genocide.

The Darfur conflict has now lasted longer than World War II, but this year could be a turning point — provided that President Obama shows leadership and that the world backs up the International Criminal Court’s expected arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

The stakes are evident in this little market town of Dogdoré, whose normal population of just a few thousand has swelled to 28,000 desperate, fearful people driven from smaller villages. They don’t think it’s safe here, but they find some reassurance in numbers — and leaving town isn’t an option, either, because flying out from the dirt airstrip is the only way to avoid rampant banditry on the roads.

Aid workers were pulled from Dogdoré in the fall because of violence in the area, leaving people on their own. Aid workers have just returned, but the entire town remains on edge.

One of the first persons we met was Qatri Ibrahim, a young woman who fled her village when the Sudanese janjaweed militia attacked and shot her 5-year-old and 8-year-old sons. “I’m afraid,” she said grimly. “But there are other people here, so I stay.”

Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

Children at a refugee camp near the town of Goz Beida, Chad

In Darfur and eastern Chad, you can randomly approach any group of people and find heartbreaking stories. Mr. Clooney was clowning around with a group of boys bathing in the river — taking their photo and showing it to them digitally — and that’s when we met the 13-year-old boy with the bullet in his knee.

He’s Suleiman Ahsan, and he was wearing a pair of blue shorts — the only clothes he has. He also has a machete scar on his forehead; both it and the bullet date from a janjaweed attack on his village two years ago that killed his father.

Last year, Suleiman joined a militia and became a child soldier to avenge his father. “Recruiters come to the camps looking for boys like me to fight,” Suleiman told us. “Boys of 10 or 12 are old enough.”

Suleiman said that he learned to shoot but found the soldier’s life too grueling, so he deserted. Now he’s back to struggling to find food.

The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for President Bashir — widely expected in the coming weeks — has the area particularly on edge, for fear that Mr. Bashir could retaliate by using a proxy force to invade Chad.

The fact that Sudan’s state-sponsored slaughter of civilians goes on, year after year, in and out of Darfur, is a monument to the fecklessness of the international community. A spasm of that same fecklessness intruded on this trip with Mr. Clooney, who is traveling unofficially but is a United Nations goodwill ambassador.

* Apparently concerned that Mr. Clooney might say something strongly critical of Mr. Bashir — perhaps come down hard on genocide? — the United Nations called me on Wednesday to say that effective immediately it was pulling Mr. Clooney’s security escort as he traveled these roads along the border. Now that did seem petty and mean-spirited. A Frenchman working for Save the Children was murdered on such roads last year, and the U.N. requires a military escort for its own vehicles here.

If the U.N. is too craven to protect its own goodwill ambassadors — because they might criticize genocide — it’s not surprising that it and the international community fail to protect hundreds of thousands of voiceless Darfuris.

Oh, and now for the juicy truth about all of Mr. Clooney’s wild romances and motorcycle accidents. Darn — out of space. Wait for my next column from this trip on Sunday ...

I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 19, 2009, on page A27 of the New York edition.

Source: www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19

End of NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF article

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On the Ground

Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.

Go to Blog » Go to Columnist Page »

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Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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Nightly Newscast from February 19, 2009
which includes a report from Ann Curry about Sudan

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Genocide Ends

When Enough of Us

Stand Up Against It

JOIN US
1-800-GENOCIDE
www.savedarfur.org
www.genocideintervention.net
www.standnow.org

www.miafarrow.org


Write President Obama
www.whitehouse.gov

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 available 9 AM - 5 PM EST weekdays

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Call your Senators and Representative Today!

Find your elected politicians contact information at this link:

www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected

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To call the USA Secretary of State

202-647-6575

The USA State Department public comment line

works 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

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Sample of what to say:

* I'm calling to ask President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and Ambassador Rice to protect innocent civilians in Darfur in the wake of Bashir's arrest warrant. Please issue immediate warnings to Bashir and the government of Sudan specifying consequences of attacks on civilians. Please also prepare an emergency response plan to address further violence and appoint a full-time senior level envoy. Lastly, please stand firm in support of the ICC indictment and veto any delay in the prosecution of Bashir.

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IF NOT,

THEN,

YOUR SILENCE

CONTRIBUTES

TO

ANOTHER

GENOCIDE.

www.savedarfur.org/content

CALL MR. BUSH 202 456 1111 AND TELL HIM TO LIVE UP TO HIS WORDS, NOT ON MY WATCH

Call Mr. Bush and tell him

He Is Standing Idly By

202-456-1111

CALL HIM EVERY DAY UNTIL THE GENOCIDE STOPS

THE USA AND GENOCIDE

STOPPING GENOCIDE IS A CHOICE AND WE CHOOSE NOT TO

The Secret Genocide Archive
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

Wednesday 23 February 2005

Photos don't normally appear on this page. But it's

time for all of us to look squarely at the victims of our indifference.

These are just four photos in a secret archive of thousands of photos and reports that document the genocide under way in Darfur. The materials were gathered by African Union monitors, who are just about the only people able to travel widely in that part of Sudan.

This African Union archive is classified, but it was shared with me by someone who believes that Americans will be stirred if they can see the consequences of their complacency.

The first photo was taken in the village of Hamada on Jan. 15, right after a Sudanese government-backed militia, the janjaweed, attacked it and killed 107 people. One of them was this little boy. I'm not showing the photo of his older brother, about 5 years old, who lay beside him because the brother had been beaten so badly that nothing was left of his face. And alongside the two boys was the corpse of their mother.

The second photo shows the corpse of a man with an injured leg who was apparently unable to run away when the janjaweed militia attacked.

The third photo is a man who fled barefoot and almost made it to this bush before he was shot dead.

Last is the skeleton of a man or woman whose wrists are still bound. The attackers pulled the person's clothes down to the knees, presumably so the victim could be sexually abused before being killed. If the victim was a man, he was probably castrated; if a woman, she was probably raped.

There are thousands more of these photos. Many of them show attacks on children and are too horrific for a newspaper.

One wrenching photo in the archive shows the manacled hands of a teenager from the girls' school in Suleia who was burned alive. It's been common for the Sudanese militias to gang-rape teenage girls and then mutilate or kill them.

Another photo shows the body of a young girl, perhaps 10 years old, staring up from the ground where she was killed. Still another shows a man who was castrated and shot in the head.

This archive, including scores of reports by the monitors on the scene, underscores that this slaughter is waged by and with the support of the Sudanese government as it tries to clear the area of non-Arabs. Many of the photos show men in Sudanese Army uniforms pillaging and burning African villages. I hope the African Union will open its archive to demonstrate publicly just what is going on in Darfur.

The archive also includes an extraordinary document seized from a janjaweed official that apparently outlines genocidal policies. Dated last August, the document calls for the "execution of all directives from the president of the republic" and is directed to regional commanders and security officials.

"Change the demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes," the document urges. It encourages "killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur."

It's worth being skeptical of any document because forgeries are possible. But the African Union believes this document to be authentic. I also consulted a variety of experts on Sudan and shared it with some of them, and the consensus was that it appears to be real.

Certainly there's no doubt about the slaughter, although the numbers are fuzzy. A figure of 70,000 is sometimes stated as an estimated death toll, but that is simply a U.N. estimate for the deaths in one seven-month period from nonviolent causes. It's hard to know the total mortality over two years of genocide, partly because the Sudanese government is blocking a U.N. team from going to Darfur and making such an estimate. But independent estimates exceed 220,000 - and the number is rising by about 10,000 per month.

So what can stop this genocide? At one level the answer is technical: sanctions against Sudan, a no-fly zone, a freeze of Sudanese officials' assets, prosecution of the killers by the International Criminal Court, a team effort by African and Arab countries to pressure Sudan, and an international force of African troops with financing and logistical support from the West.

But that's the narrow answer. What will really stop this genocide is indignation. Senator Paul Simon, who died in 2003, said after the Rwandan genocide, "If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different."

The same is true this time. Web sites like darfurgenocide.org and savedarfur.org are trying to galvanize Americans, but the response has been pathetic.

I'm sorry for inflicting these horrific photos on you. But the real obscenity isn't in printing pictures of dead babies - it's in our passivity, which allows these people to be slaughtered.

During past genocides against Armenians, Jews and Cambodians, it was possible to claim that we didn't fully know what was going on. This time, President Bush, Congress and the European Parliament have already declared genocide to be under way. And we have photos.

This time, we have no excuse.

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End of Nicholas Kristof’s article

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The above article is from the following link:

http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/38/9182

The above pictures are from the New York Times website

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Our only excuse is that we don’t care that unarmed, innocent families are being slaughtered, maimed, burned alive, raped, tortured because it isn’t US!

We should have to wear t-shirts that say “I don’t care that unarmed, innocent families are being slaughtered, maimed, burned alive, raped, tortured because it isn’t US!” If this was a reality show, we’d probably pay it more attention. Our silence is our response. There is nothing civil about our silence. We have a voice and we have the power to join together and demand that our elected governmental representatives in Washington, D.C. stop this genocide. But, we choose not to do so. The Darfur Genocide is coincidentally the same age as the Iraq invasion.

Stopping genocide is a choice. We feel we have nothing to lose by ignoring the Darfuri people getting slaughtered. We feel it’s not US, so why get involved. It’s a good thing it’s not US, the world would probably not want to get involved with saving US either. We are not respected in the world today. Our President Bush has done more damage to our standing in the world than any President in my lifetime. Sure, the last two sentences are my humble but worthy opinion.

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STOP AND PREVENT GENOCIDE

IT'S THE HUMANE THING TO DO

"NEVER AGAIN" IS MEANINGLESS WITHOUT THE POLITICAL WILL

Where there is a will, there is always a way

and where there is no will, there is never a way, Mr. Bush.

Call Mr. Bush daily and ask him

to live up to his words, "Not On My Watch"
202-456-1111

www.savedarfur.org

At SaveDarfur’ site type in 02871 and find my Darfur activist events

www.genocideintervention.net
www.sudandivestment.com

www.ajws.org
www.aiusa.org

We are all the keepers of justice,

OR not.

Democracy doesn't work without "We the People" speaking out.

Use Your Voice.

Be quiet and Darfuri’s die.

All a genocide needs to be successful is for good people to do nothing.

GENOCIDE THRIVES when there is NO ACCOUNTABILITY

YOU COULD MAKE THE DIFFERENCE

WHAT STAND WILL YOU TAKE?

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