From the Christian Science Monitor:

For rebels in Sudan's troubled Darfur region, every day is a struggle. With the hopes of their beleaguered people on their shoulders, they roam some of the world's least hospitable terrain, avoiding attacks by Sudanese helicopters and protecting villagers from raids by the government-backed janjaweed militia.

But, increasingly, the rebels are at risk of becoming the key stumbling block to peace, say analysts.

...

Now, with the patience of the international community wearing thin, Darfur's disparate rebels are meeting in South Sudan in hopes of forming a common agenda for Oct. 27 peace talks in Tripoli, Libya. But even if they do come up with a unified position before heading into the UN-sponsored talks, observers say that getting rebel leaders to agree on who should represent them will be much more difficult.

"The rebels need to get their act together," says Alex de Waal, a Darfur expert at Harvard University, adding that the Sudanese government "is loving every minute of this."

The Boston Globe:

African Union and United Nations officials are looking into reports of a new massacre in Darfur, in which witnesses said that Sudanese government troops and their allied militias killed more than 30 civilians, slitting the throats of several men praying at a mosque and shooting a 5-year-old boy in the back as he tried to run away.

According to several residents of Muhagiriya, a small town in southern Darfur, two columns of uniformed government troops, along with dozens of militiamen not in uniform, surrounded the town around noon on Oct. 8 and stormed the market.

Let's be clear: if this is true, what we're witnessing here is the systematic execution of civilians by their own government. Pretty remarkable, totally horrifying, and not okay in the least.

Newsweek has a gripping interview with General Martin Luther Agwai, the commander of the new joint UN/AU force in Darfur. Um, this guy really does seem to be sounding an alarm here about the scary future of Darfur. Here he is on troop levels:

We're supposed to have 20,000 troops and 6,000 policemen. As of now, we don't even know the troop contributors. To be able to perform the task that is expected of us, that is what is my biggest challenge now. The resolution itself stated that by the end of August we would know all the troop contributors, and now we are at almost the end of September, and we don't know. So you see the whole program is running behind schedule.

On his lack of authority:

Right now, I don't have control over the AU troops. When my [AU-UN] troops arrive, then we'll resolve most of these problems. We are committed to staying, and I hope other countries will still allow their troops to come.

On unreasonable expectations:

I have had telephone calls from different organizations and individuals congratulating me that I now have 20,000 troops. Unfortunately, as you and I know now, we don't even know the troop contributors, so how can we talk about what those troops will do? Those people who are calling me will see nothing happening on the ground and feel disappointed. That is why I have already cautioned people not to expect too much because there is not much happening on the ground.

On what's ahead for him and his mission:

I accepted the job because I wanted to give it my best, and I can only give it my best and be judged by the world depending on the resources available to me. And the resources are not forthcoming.

Sure, the joint African Union/United Nations force seems like a great idea, but without follow-through and resource commitment, it could even be more destructive that not going in to Darfur before. I'm like a broken record on the idea that all a plan and 35 cents gets you is a copy of the Washington Post. It's true in American politics, it's true in African politics, it's true for the people living and dying in Darfur. But we all too often announce a plan, think we've done actually done something, and then move on.

It stinks when it happens in the U.S., to be sure. But it looks like it's on track to happen in Darfur, and the price of that is going to be the suffering of way too many people.

Things I learned from reading the Congressional Research Service report on AFRICOM, the Defense Department's planned centralized U.S. Command in Africa: the way things stand today, Sudan (and, of course, Darfur) falls within the area of responsibility of the Central Command but Chad (and, of course, the many Darfuri refugee camps and towns there) is under the purview of the European Command. Not ideal...

So rebel leaders gathered this week in Eritrea, under the watch of that country's government. In Eritrea, Darfuri rebels can meet, chat, visit coffee shops, and watch cable television. Of note was that the reporting out of the rebel force get-together that implied that the upcoming peace talks in Libya are destined for failure. And frankly, after the killings as Haskanita, it doesn't seem like the prospects for reaching any meaningful peace accord are very good.

But interesting to me is the question of why the rebels would be meeting in teeny weeny Eritrea. I mean, it's a country no bigger than Tennessee. It seems, though, that Eritrea has ambitions of playing a dominent role in northeast Africa:

Eritrea is a little country with big ambitions. Since its independence in 1993, it has projected an aggressive foreign policy, shaping events in the Horn of Africa, though it has only five million people and is one of the poorest countries on earth.

In the past few months, Eritrea has opened its doors to rebel commanders from its neighbors, especially Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia, which is part of the reason American officials are alarmed. The State Department says Eritrea has been shipping arms to Islamist fighters in Somalia, an allegation that the Eritrean government denies. At the same time, American diplomats have been quietly working with the Eritreans to push Darfur's ever expanding galaxy of rebel groups to peace talks scheduled for the end of October in Libya.

The Eritreans have a decent track record, American officials say, when it comes to Sudan. Last year, the president of Eritrea, Isaias Afewerki, brokered a peace deal between the Sudanese government and rebels in a separate conflict in eastern Sudan that had ground on for 15 years and that cost thousands of lives.

African Union officials said Eritrea wields even more influence in Darfur, because of its longstanding contacts with the rebel groups there.

The Eritreans "have control over some of these movements," said Sam Ibok, a senior adviser of the African Union. "And the Eritreans have played a constructive role."

So frustrating. The seven Nigerian peacekeepers killed in the Haskanita attack have been buried:

A sob rose from the crowd of mourners Friday as white ambulances entered Nigeria's main military cemetery, carrying the bodies of seven soldiers killed while on peacekeeping duty in Darfur.

Nigeria, the biggest troop contributor to African peacekeeping missions, suffered the heaviest losses when Darfur rebels overran an African Union post in North Darfur last weekend. In all, seven Nigerians and one peacekeeper each from Botswana, Senegal and Mali were killed.

Nigerians, including those mourning Friday, said the attack would not bury hope that they and other Africans can bring peace to the world's poorest continent with missions like the one in Sudan's Darfur.

''Anywhere you have war, you will have losses,'' said Matthew Edoh, whose uncle, Lance Corp. Danjuma Madaki, was among the seven Nigerians brought home for burial Friday. ''But if you can go for peace, even if you sacrifice yourself, you must go. We are all fellow human beings.''

Before being flown back to Nigeria for burial, they were honored with a parade in Sudan:

Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Andrew Owoye Azazi, Force Commander of the AU-UN hybrid force in Sudan, Gen Martin Luther Agwai, Nigerian Ambassador to Sudan, Ambassador Salihu Ahmed-Sambo, and his Malian counterpart led other military and civilian leaders to pay tributes to the fallen heroes. Kicking the tributes, the Nigerian contingent Commander, Col. James Oladipo was chocked with emotion.

With his voice shaky but still echoing through the afternoon humid weather, Col. Oladipo read out the curriculum vitae of the seven soldiers, sometimes pausing, removing his handkerchief to wipe his face intermittently. As he saluted and sat down at his front row seat, he leaned on his two hands, wiping his face. For the major part of the ceremony, he held his chin in his left hand.

Col. Oladipo later told The Guardian: "It is bad to loose one soldier. It is too terrible to loose seven, in one swoop. It's enough to make anybody emotional. None of these soldiers hesitated when their nation called upon them to resign the pleasures of life and leave their families, kith and kin to serve in a land strange to all of them. But believing that every man should live in peace and they could fall in this noble cause, they determined at the hazards of their lives to answer their nation and humanity in Darfur. They resigned to hope their unknown chance of going back home to meet their loved ones."

The names of the soldiers:

79NA/30253 Lance Corporal Danjuma Madaki, 96NA/14/13956 Lance Corporal Usman Saleh, 97NA/45/5447 Private Duniya Audu, 98NA/47/4877 Private Samuel Orokpo, 01NA/50/927 Private Bala Mohammed, 02NA/52/2292 Private John Dogara and 03NA/54/5426 Trooper Toyin Alao.

The DARFUR Blog reports on how African literary giants Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe have responded to Darfur.

If you're reading this on the actual darfurwatch.com website and not via RSS, then over to the right you're seeing an odd picture of a man with his arms spread wide and standing in front of what looks to be a Volvo --->. Flickr tells me his name is Fred. I designed the photo block for this site to simply pull the latest photo from Flickr that someone at some point has tagged with "Darfur." Sometimes it turns up some interesting finds, but I have no editorial control over what gets displayed. Thus, sometimes we get a Fred.

Wow. This is one brave ex-President. Jimmy Carter attempted to force his way into the pro-government town of Kabkabiya yesterday. He got into a shouting match with Sudanese security forces before U.S. Secret Service guided him into a car. The former president was in Sudan as part of a mission by the Elders.

This Christian Science Monitor piece accepts the idea that the conflict in Darfur is tied to the encroaching Sahara, and gives an account of how Tuareg herders and Hausa farmers in increasingly-desertified Niger are working to avoid that same fate.

Still no real clarity on who was behind the recent vicious attack against African Union peacekeepers in Haskanita that left about a dozen Nigerian soliders dead and the future of the joint U.N./A.U. force in jeopardy, but here's where we are:

Two Sudanese rebel groups are suspected of being behind the attack, a source close to the investigation in Sudan said Tuesday.

"It could be a combined attack by the Sudan Liberation Movement SLM-Unity of Abdhallah Yahia and another group which recently split from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)," the source said on condition of anonymity.

The source declined to say what the suspicions were based on.

The attack on African Union troops in Darfur in Haskanita is pretty much the worst possible thing that could occur at this juncture, and I have to imagine that whomever perpetrated the attacks knew that full well. At least a dozen peacekeepers were killed when their base was raided. About 20 more are still missing. Putting together the 27,000 joint A.U./U.N. force was a challenging project even before this attack. Now that peacekeepers are being killed and kidnapped in large numbers, countries are going to have to engage in some introspection before deciding that it's worthwhile to send their troops into this chaotic situation.

Who was behind the attacks? Given the history of conflict in Darfur, the mind immediately jumps to the government in Khartoum. But the reporting from the region is fuzzy this morning and it looks like there may be a chance that rebel forces were behind it.

While Darfur has never been a strictly black and white situation, things now have turned into a big mess of gray. There are no longer the perpetrators and the victims; there are now a wide variety of players who have changing loyalties and motives and tactics. And that happened while the world watched. From the New York Times:

Haskanita is embroiled in a three-sided war among two formidable rebel groups and the government. United Nations officials said that the area has become so dangerous that most aid organizations have pulled out.

Recently, Haskanita has been the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in the region. Aid workers said those battles killed more than 300 people, including several dozen mowed down by government helicopter gunships. The government denied killing any civilians.

On top of that, the two main rebel groups in Haskanita, the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, have splintered and begun fighting among themselves, driving thousands of civilians from their homes. Many had set up tents around the small African Union base, where the peacekeepers were handing out food and medicine.

I'm no international law expert (Though I audited a grad level class on it! So I'm at least semi-expert.) But it seems to me that here's a solid example of how the U.S. refusal to support the International Criminal Court can come back to bite it in the behind. The ICC has always been something of an experiment, and one whose success is far from guaranteed. America's disdain for the court doesn't help matters. Now we have the U.N. Security Council pushing Sudan to hand over two men named by the ICC as war crime suspects. Not suprisingly, Sudan's response has always been a firm "heck no." One of the guys still serves as the humanitarian affairs minister in Khartoum. In fact, he was recently put in charge of the government's investigation into rights abuses in Darfur. Add that all up, and it seems unlikely that Khartoum is going to heed this latest call by the U.N. Human Rights council to hand over the suspects to the ICC.

Spanking new French president Nicholas Sarkozy had some success today convincing the U.N. Security Council to agree to a plan to send E.U. troops in to both Chad and the country with the world's most obvious name, the Central African Republic. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have of course fled to Chad and CAR while trying to escape the violence in Darfur. These hundreds of thousands of refugees aren't, of course, included in the numbers of Darfurs' dead, but in a sense their lives have ended because of the fighting there. At least, their lives as they knew them.

And what's happened of late has been that instability of Darfur is spreading beyond Sudan's borders:

Life in the eastern Chad city of Goz Beida was calm before last fall's clashes, says Mr. Ali. But now the influx of Chadian refugees – and the arrival of more than 25 different relief groups – have quadrupled the population, straining already scarce supplies of water, firewood, and grazing land for animals that the refugees brought with them.

Scores of smaller towns in the area are facing a similar situation, including the market town of Kerfi, which has seen its population triple. The rains have filled riverbeds called wadis that are dry for most of the year, and food aid to Kerfi ran out in July. The next shipment won't get through until next month.

The U.N. Security Council signed off on the plan today:

The new force would attempt to block fighters from Sudan from crossing into a corner of the Central African Republic, according to the 10-page French-drafted resolution approved by a 15 to 0 vote.

EU defense ministers meet on Friday in Portugal to give a final go-ahead for the deployment of up to 4,000 troops by the end of the year beginning next month. The United Nations would field up to 300 police, 50 military liaison officers and civilian personnel.

(Photo by mknobil.)

Fresh from the Foggy Bottom print shop:

Washington -- Measurable progress is being made on resolving conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan by the United States and international partners that have been working to arrange talks among the warring parties, a U.S. diplomat says.

A Darfur cease-fire, brokered in part by the Libyan government, is working, and the number of deaths is lower than it was in 2006, U.S. Special Envoy Andrew Natsios said recently during a meeting of Africa specialists at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.

"I am more optimistic now than I've been in a long time," Natsios said. "But it is a guarded optimism. Much hard work still needs to be done" to convince rebel leaders to resolve their differences so they can approach peace talks with a unified set of proposals as well as ensure Sudanese compliance with the U.N. proposal to deploy 24,000 peacekeepers to Darfur in a joint African Union (AU)-United Nations force.

Darfur also will be on the agenda of the upcoming U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, which will be followed by peace talks between Sudanese government and rebel leaders in Tripoli, hosted by the Libyan government October 27, Natsios said.

At the U.N. General Assembly meeting, Natsios said, one of the major topics of discussion will be "how we as the international community continue to use our leverage and influence to keep the Darfur peace talks on track."

Together with international partners, Natsios said, "we are discussing measures, including sanctions, to discourage anyone on any side from taking actions that will jeopardize the [Tripoli] talks. This includes the government of Sudan," as well as rebel groups.

Since violence first sparked in Darfur in 2003, more than 200,000 lives have been lost and 2.5 million people displaced in fighting between government-backed forces called the Janjaweed and rebel movements contending for power.

Read the whole thing here.

Over on TPM Cafe activist Ben Naimark-Rowse has a rundown of online advocacy efforts around Darfur. In brief, Naimark-Rowse highlights the Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that I discussed here, the Save Darfur Coalition's Million Voices for Darfur, the Genocide Intervention Network's divestment campaign, and the 24Hours for Darfur video library.

"Howard" hints at what I think is a compelling point in the comments. If my memory is serving me right, the most potent examples of "web 2.0" being used to create large-scale change in one country or another involved the efforts of the people who live there. See, for example, the use of Google satellite maps in Bahrain or the "Hello Garci"cell phone ringtones in the Philippines. Have we seen yet an example of anyone using Internet tools to affect wide spread change in a country other than their own?

(Of course, the most obvious example of external intervention by people thousands of miles away that did seem to have an effect might be the divestment movement aimed at apartheid-era South Africa. But that was certainly pre-Internet.)

There's a fundamental disagreement between Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and the rest of the world over what is actually taking place in Darfur. Bashir still insists that all of the violence taking place there is a simple fight over resources, no different than any of the other conflicts between tribal groups that dot the rest of Africa. Here's Bashir:

Everything being said over Darfur's mass annihilation and mass rape are lies.

That's an interesting starting point for the upcoming negotiation sessions set to take place in Tripoli between the government of Sudan and rebel groups. Bashir refuses to admit to the state of affairs that nearly every impartial observer has testified to being the facts on the ground.

From where I'm standing, this is less than entirely welcomed news. Al Qaeda's supposed second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, is now calling for all good Sudanese Muslims to commit to jihad against the joint African Union/United Nations force. Zawahri is particularly peeved at President Bashir for first making noise about never letting in international peacekeeper and then later agreeing to the 26,000 troop force.

Roméo Dallaire's book Shake Hands with the Devil is his account of his time as head of the U.N. mission in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, and it's probably one of the more horrifying books you can read. Dallaire was for all intents and purposes the 'world's' representative in Rwanda as conflict turned to chaos, and there was really nothing he could do about the fact that Hutus were set on demonstrating the very worst of man's inhumanity to man, with their Tutsi and pro-Tutsi Hutu neighbors as their victims. And what's more, Dallaire went from a decorated Canadian military man to just a shell of a person, so troubled as he was by what he experienced in East Africa.

So Dallaire's in a pretty good position to give some practical advice to Martin Agwai, the Nigerian general who will head up the joint U.N/African Union force in Darfur. Here is some of his guidance:

It is important that your official reporting, in describing progress on mandate implementation, should highlight obstacles you face that require action by the two headquarters, or by member states. You can anticipate being let down by everyone on whom you depend for support, be that troops, funding, logistics or political engagement. Only by shining a spotlight on those failures in every possible way can you mobilise the attention necessary to get the action you need. Bear in mind that whoever fails you will, in the end, be the most active in blaming you for whatever goes wrong.

The full open letter from Dallaire to Agwai is here.

Yesterday was the Global Day for Darfur and activists gathered all across the globe to raise awareness on the situation there. Here's a completely awesome photo taken of the protest in Thailand, in front of the Chinese embassy. (I'd love to embed it here, but I can't because it's under an "All Rights Reserved License." And that's a shame, because if your goal is to get attention for an issue, than you really should go the Creative Commons route.)

Here's a interesting turn of events. China will be allowed to take part in the U.N./A.U. peacekeeping team that will be deployed in Darfur next month. China clearly is seeing this as an opportunity to salvage its reputation vis-a-vis Sudan:

While Sudan sells 70 per cent of its oil to China, and Amnesty International has accused Beijing of selling military aircraft, helicopters and weapons to the Khartoum regime, China hopes that joining the mission will dispel the idea it is happy to extract the riches of poorer countries while turning a blind eye to atrocities committed by them.

But what's also interesting is that the Chinese troops won't be in Darfur to engage in any sort of combat. Instead, they'll be there to serve mostly as engineers. That, of course is the role that China has long played in Sudan -- serving as the technocratic arm of the government in Khartoum.

The latest celebrities to join the chorus of those making noise about Darfur: Elle Macpherson, Germaine Greer, and, in my opinion, the best actress in the whole world -- Cate Blanchett. The three signed an open letter that ran in papers this weekend, which said in part:

The crisis in Darfur and eastern Chad remains one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. The international community must not look the other way as the situation deteriorates

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir will be sitting down one-on-one with Pope Benedict this week. George Clooney's happy; Amnesty International is not so pleased.

U.N. poobah Ban Ki-Moon sums up his recent travels to northeast Africa:

I have just returned from a week in Darfur and the surrounding region. I went to listen to the candid views of its people -- Sudanese officials, villagers displaced by fighting, humanitarian aid workers, the leaders of neighboring countries. I came away with a clear understanding. There can be no single solution to this crisis. Darfur is a case study in complexity. If peace is to come, it must take into account all the elements that gave rise to the conflict.

Everything I saw and heard convinced me that this is possible.

The whole thing is well worth reading, but since I just spent some time digging into the idea that climate change might or might not be at the root of the crisis, this part caught my eye:

During my visit, I was shown Gaddafi's Great Manmade River: hundreds of miles of pipeline carrying millions of gallons of fresh water from beneath the Sahara. In a region where water is so scarce, this is remarkable. Flying over Lake Chad -- a vast inland sea that has shrunk to one-tenth its original size -- the previous day, it was obvious that this region's future also depends on supplies of water.

In N'Djamena, Chad, President Idriss Deby told me that without water there can be no economic development.

That's a bit of a different take that that of Nick Kristof on the impact of climate change on the region. More on the disappearance of Lake Chad here. It's reportedly down to 20% of the size it was just 40 years ago, and the BBC at least blames both global warming and water extraction.

Wired's Brandon Keim questioned The New York Times' Nick Kristof on the premise of an article in the Atlantic called "The Real Roots of Darfur," i.e., that the crisis there is directly tied to climate change and the drying of the Sahel (the semi-desert band between the Sahara and the rest of Africa). Here's Keim's take on Kristof's response;

He knows as much about Darfur as anyone -- and in his words, "the cause-and-effect is overstated." Other countries are experiencing drought, and they're not responding by annihilating entire populations.

Of course, the argument isn't "desertification --> genocide." It's more, like Stephan Faris says in that Atlantic piece, quoting Alex de Waal:

[Environmental degradation] creates very dry tinder. So if anyone wants to put a match to it, they can light it up.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon is defending his decision to hold peace talks later this month in Libya. U.N. Watch, for one, isn't happy with Libya on the grounds that Gadhafi's record on human rights makes his country less than the best place to hold a forum on rights abuses in Darfur. Here's Ban:

For individual countries' human rights record, there may be many different understandings or, again, interpretations. But at this time particularly, while I urge, in my capacity as secretary-general, to uphold the charter provisions to promote and protect human rights gain, for political negotiations, I only appreciate Libya's flexibility and kind gesture.

I just read David Luban's piece called "Calling Genocide by its Rightful Name" in the Chicago Journal of International Law, and I highly recommend it. The problem, in a way, is that Raphael Lemkin set the bar too high by tying "genocide" to the Holocaust. Now any time bad guys don't try to eliminate the entirety of a population expressly for who they are, the international community gets into this nit-picking over whether the crimes against humanity involved rise to the level of the G-word.

But even Hitler, writes Luban, didn't intend to eliminate every Jewish person everywhere they existed, from Austria to America. (He may have wanted to, but he never had the intention, which is the key here.) His aim was to do away with those Jewish people within his neck of Europe. Similarly, Janjaweed or GOS don't necessarily have the intention to eliminate every Darfurian. And in some current interpretations of international law, that makes what's happening in Darfur something less than genocide.

If you do some historical reading about Lemkin's quest to define "genocide" for the world, a key piece of it is that he needed to give a name to a crime that was so particularly heinous because it sought to strangle diversity. That's what's happening in Darfur, with little doubt. The offenders there want to reduce the diversity of the human experience. That's why we hear about Janjaweed raping women while saying their goal is to make lighter children.

Again, if you're interested in this sort of thing, I suggest you read the Luban piece. It's real good.

Powerful stuff from China's envoy on Darfur. He's ticked about Western criticisms of the oil relationship between Beijing and Sudan:

You have eaten all the meat and only left us with some soup in the most difficult regions of the world. Simply because we sip a little bit of the soup, we are severely condemned. Is that fair?

So Moammar Gadhafi is going to host next month's peace talks in Libya, huh? I know what you're thinking: what's George Clooney's take on this latest development? Well, for the record, George thinks that this is the first chance in a long while to get the peace process moving, though he's not overly optimistic that it's a very good chance. Bashir has agreed to the talks, and it looks like they'll be held under joint African Union-U.N. auspices. The trick will be getting enough rebel groups to attend to make any peace agreement that come out of the process carry real weight. Word is that Abdel Wahid Nur, leader of the Sudan Liberation Movement, says he ain't coming.

No word on what that other George, the one in the White House, thinks about one of the "axis of evil" nations taking a lead role in the Sudan peace process.

More seriously, it's hard to know if investing any amount of hope in the Libya talks makes sense, given that there's been no public indication that Bashir or the Government of Sudan (henceforth, GOS) more broadly has any interest in stopping the violence in Darfur.

I guess one hope could be that China is putting pressure on GOS to do something to take the steam out of global Darfur activism before the upcoming summer games in Beijing.

(Sweet photo of Ubari, Libya, by Miles 78.)

Interesting discussion of whether the swirl of violence we see in Darfur today still qualifies as "genocide" under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. Eric Reeves from Smith College makes a compelling point about the secondary effects of violence. (I think he makes that point, at least -- the piece is kinda confusing.) Reeves argues that if the gist of the genocide definition is that one group is looking to deliberate extinguish, in whole or in part, another group, then that's genocide. And the refugee camps in Darfur and parts of Chad are contributing to the continued destruction of the people of Darfur, then bingo.

Now's a good a time as any to recommend reading the discussion of how the whole idea of "genocide" as a named concept came about in Samantha Power's Problem from Hell. I also just found an academic take on how it applies to Darfur here, but I haven't read it yet and so can't recommend it one way or the other.

Oy vey. Ahmed Haroun has been named by the Sudanese government to investigate the human rights abuses in Darfur. So what? Well, there's the small fact that of the two people accused by the International Criminal Court of war crimes in Darfur, one of them has just been named by the Sudanese government to investigate human rights abuses in Darfur...

No biggie, argues Khartoum. Sudan has refused to be party to the ICC -- as has the U.S., for that matter. So what weight do their accusations carry?

Britain's Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that activist groups in the U.K. have were wrong to have used 400,000 as the number of men, women, and children killed in Darfur. It's the opinion of the ASA that there's enough real disagreement over the death tally to make it misleading to act like the 400k number is settled and definitive. Writing in the Guardian, Julian Borger thinks that 200,000 is probably a more accurate number, and that the commonly agreed upon 2 million figure for displaced Darfurians is spot on.

Of course, we won't know for sure until observers and investigators are really allowed in to the region and can do a scientifically rigorous accounting, and that ain't happening yet. (Photo by David Haberlah.)

What, exactly, do we think the U.N.'s Ban Ki-moon was trying to tell Omar al-Bashir by parachuting into Khartoum and calling himself "a realist, a man of action" -- a guy who has:

never put much stock in grand rhetoric, dreams of the future, 'visions' that promise more than can be delivered.

Hmm, interesting. It's a curious approach for the U.N. Secretary General to use when he's talking to a man accused of perpetuating an on-going and horrific genocide against his own people, no? Bashir, it's been said, doesn't like being lectured or looked down upon. Ban seems to have taken this into account, and tailored his appeal to come across like he's making no moral judgment about Bashir's actions, while still telling him to knock-off all the, you know, rapin' and killin' and burnin' and lootin' and pillagin'.

The bad guys are turning on each other. The Arab Terjem and Mahria tribes, who worked side by side to terrorize South Darfur, have turned on each other over war booty and control.

I just finished reading Brian Steidle and Gretchen Steidle Wallace's The Devil Came on Horseback and have been motivated to make another go at keeping this blog up to date. We'll see how it goes...

The conflict is typically characterized as genocide, waged by the Arab Janjaweed and their backers in the Sudanese government, against Darfur's black Africans. But what is often overlooked is that the roots of the conflict may have more to do with ecology than ethnicity. To live on the poor and arid soil of the Sahel--just south of the Sahara--is to be mired in an eternal fight for water, food and shelter. The few pockets of good land have been the focus of intermittent conflict for decades between nomads (who tend to be Arabs) and settled farmers (who are both Arab and African). That competition is intensifying. The Sahara is advancing steadily south, smothering soil with sand. Rainfall has been declining in the region for the past half-century, according to the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In Darfur there are too many people in a hot, poor, shrinking land, and it's not hard to start a fight in a place like that.