The Observer

From Wikipedia:  The lines of conflict in Darfur are ethnic and tribal, rather than religious. One side of the armed conflict is composed mainly of the Sudanese military and the Janjaweed, a militia group recruited mostly from the Arab Baggara tribes of the northern Rizeigat, camel-herding nomads. The other side comprises a variety of rebel groups, notably the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement, recruited primarily from the land-tilling non-Arab Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit ethnic groups. The Sudanese government, while publicly denying that it supports the Janjaweed, is said to have provided money and assistance to the militia and has participated in joint attacks targeting the tribes from which the rebels draw support.

The United Nations  estimates that the conflict has left as many as 200,000 dead from violence and disease. As many as 2.5 million are thought to have been displaced. The combination of decades of drought, desertification, and overpopulation are among the causes of the Darfur conflict.

International attention to the Darfur conflict largely began with reports by the advocacy organizations Amnesty International in July 2003 and the International Crisis Group in December 2003.  The UN, lacking both the funding and military support of the wealthy countries, left up to the African Union to take on peacekeeping without sufficient resources. The overwhelmed AU force struggled to stem the bloodshed in Darfur until it was replaced by a joint AU-UN force that began deploying in January 2008 after months of wrangling with the Sudanese government. The new force is authorized to have 26,000 troops and police but only a fraction are on the ground.

A recent UN report has decribed attacks in January and February 2008 by Sudanese forces on Darfur villagers  as violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.  “The scale of destruction of civilian property, including objects indispensable for the survival of the civilian population, suggests that the damage was a deliberate and integral part of a military strategy,” says the report.  However,  Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir says that the crisis in Darfur is a media fabrication and that in most of the region people are living normal lives!!!

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On September 13, 1984 at the University of Notre Dame, Mario Cumo tackled the complex question whether the separation between church and state imply separation between religion and politics? Between morality and government? Here are some comments from his speech that are as valid today as they were then:

Almost all Americans accept the religious values as a part of our public life. We are a religious people, many of us descended from ancestors who came here expressly to live their religious faith free from coercion or repression. But we are also a people of many religions, with no established church, who hold different beliefs on many matters. Our public morality, then — the moral standards we maintain for everyone, not just the ones we insist on in our private lives — depends on a consensus view of right and wrong. The values derived from religious belief will not — and should not — be accepted as part of the public morality unless they are shared by the pluralistic community at large, by consensus. So that the fact that values happen to be religious values does not deny them acceptability as part of this consensus. But it does not require their acceptability, either…

I think it’s already apparent that a good part of this nation understands — if only instinctively — that anything which seems to suggest that God favors a political party or the establishment of a state church is wrong and dangerous. Way down deep the American people are afraid of an entangling relationship between formal religions — or whole bodies of religious belief — and government. Apart from the constitutional law and apart from religious doctrine, there’s a sense that tells us it’s wrong to presume to speak for God or to claim God’s sanction of our particular legislation and his rejection of all other positions. Most of us are offended when we see religion being trivialized by its appearance in political throwaway pamphlets. The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or Church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman.

This speech merits contrast and comparison with Reagan’s address on politics and morality.

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President Reagan gave a great speech at a Ecumenical Prayer Breakfast in Dallas, Texas on August 23, 1984.  He asserted:

The truth is, politics and morality are inseparable. And — And as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related…

A state is nothing more than a reflection of its citizens: The more decent the citizens, the more decent the state. If you practice a religion, whether you’re Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or guided by some other faith, then your private life will be influenced by a sense of moral obligation, and so, too, will your public life…

We establish no religion in this country, nor will we ever. We command no worship. We mandate no belief. But we poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings. We court corruption when we leave it bereft of belief. All are free to believe or not to believe; all are free to practice a faith or not. But those who believe must be free to speak of and act on their belief, to apply moral teaching to public questions.

He asks:

If all the children of our country studied together all of the many religions in our country, wouldn’t they learn greater tolerance of each other’s beliefs? If children prayed together, would they not understand what they have in common? And would this not, indeed, bring them closer? And is this not to be desired?

This timeless speech deserves careful study and analysis, irrrespective of whether one agrees or not with the specific positions of President Reagan.

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The August 15, 2007 decision of the Burmese junta to hike fuel prices provided the proverbial last straw that triggered the protests in Burma.  According to the BBC News report, the initial demonstrations were lead by pro-democracy activists.  The monks joined in after troops used force to break up a peaceful rally in the town of Pakokku on September 5.  They also withdrew their religious services from the military and their families.  A group called the Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks emerged to co-ordinate the protests, and on 21 September they issued a statement describing the military government as “the enemy of the people”. The group pledged to continue their protests until they had “wiped the military dictatorship from the land of Burma”.  On September 24, thousands of people responded to a call from the monks and joined a massive protest in Rangoon.

At first, the country’s military leaders held back, but after a week of increasingly large protests, a dawn-to-dusk curfew was introduced and hundreds of troops and riot police moved in to quell further protests.  Despite a crackdown on the internet and mobile phone links to the outside world, television pictures showed police using baton charges and tear gas on monks and fellow protesters.  On the worst day of violence, 27 September, the junta said nine people had been killed, but the death toll is thought to be far higher. There have been reports of thousands of arrests and monks are said to have been rounded up and transported to prison camps in the north.

Six months after the military crackdown, people no longer talk about politics for fear of arrest and safety.  According to a U.S. State Department assessment, the quality of life in Burma during the past six months has deteriorated. Poverty is widespread, and the economy increasingly shows the effects of a growing government deficit, rising inflation, shortfalls in energy supplies and growing foreign exchange shortages. Severe human rights abuses are commonplace, particularly in ethnic minority areas, where there are continuing reports of extrajudicial killings, rape and disappearances. In coordination with the European Union and other states, the United States has imposed sanctions on Burma aimed at encouraging democratic transition and greater respect for human rights.  The United States hopes that the talks with Aung San Suu Kyi and the military will will lead to meaningful democratic change and national reconciliation.

A constitutional refrendum is planned for May.  Yet, as a FT analysis points out, Burma’s new constitution may simply mean the perpetuation of military rule in fresh garb.

See also Time magazine’s Burma: 19 Years of Protests.

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John MaCain gave a remarkable speech on March 26 at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council  (transcript video).  Asserting that he hates war, he went on to argue that we have incurred a moral responsibility in Iraq and that it would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a great nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possibly genocide.

Early in the speech, he said that the United States must lead in the 21st century, but the United States cannot lead by virtue of its power alone.  We must be strong politically, economically, and militarily; but we must lead by attracting others to our cause, by defending the rules of international civilized society, and by creating the new international institutions necessary to advance the peace and freedoms.  We would need new pillars — a League of Democracies, a new nuclear nonproliferation regime and a successor to the Kyoto treaty.  We would need to rely more on leading democracies, and less on dictators and autocrats.

Coming on the heels of Obama’s nuanced speech on race, we might be in for a treat this election season.

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This video shows how Mrs. Clinton recently described  her dangerous trip to Tuzla, Bosnia in 1966:

There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

This video shows what actually happened during that visit.

Whatever happended to the Hillary Clinton who so eloquently argued that Women Rights are Human Rights and that It takes a Village to raise a Child and who exhorted Harvard graduates to make the health of their patients their first concern?  She does not need these shenanigans.

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Lhasa remains inaccessible to foreign journalists. The Economist’s correspondant James Miles happened to be in Lhasa when the riots broke out.  Here is his report of what he saw:  A Week in Tibet: Trashing the Beijing Road (March 19).  Here are some pictures.

Here is his later report: Fears of contagion from Tibet (March 21).  Here are two earlier reports: Lhasa under siege (March 17), Monks on the match (March 13).  Here is a very good Wikipedia page on this topic.

Here is FT’s Geoff Dyer’s report and pictures. 

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Barack Obama’s speech on Race (Transcript Video), delivered on March 18 at Philadephia two blocks from the Libery Bell, is a complex but stirring speech:

I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction …

But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

It is remniscent of John Kennedy’s address to Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960  (Transcript Video) in which he voiced similar hope, saying he believed in “an America where religious intolerance will someday end, where all men and all churches are treated as equals”. 

It also echoes Robert Kennedy’s 1968 address (Transcript Video) in Indianapolis after Martin Luther King’s assassination in which he said people had a choice to move the nation in a direction filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge, or make an effort to understand and to comprehend, and to replace violence with love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer, whether they be white or they be black.

No one can know for sure the significance of this speech for this election, but it is likely to find its way into the annals of  great political speeches of our time.

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