Sounds and Fury

1.你可能已經知道蘇丹的達佛地區，發生了本世紀最嚴重的種族屠殺。當地的親政府阿拉伯人民兵至少屠殺了二十萬黑人回教徒。台灣媒體似乎都沒有報導，但Torret, inertia, anarch最近都寫到。


2.你可能還不知道，美國媒體界對這個問題報導討論最多的是紐約時報專欄記者Nicholas Kristof，他寫了許多篇專欄報導達佛情況，並且批評美國政府的行動緩慢。但是讓Kristof及其他意見領袖人注意到達佛情況，卻是一個得白血症的大學老師Eric Reeves，他是第一個用genocide（種族滅絕）這個字來形容達佛情況的人，而且是用自己的錢來來寫信、作網站等進行喚起公共意識的運動。（關於他的簡介，見後面附上文章）。


3.你可能還不知道，對於阻止達佛的慘劇，美國的民間比政府作的更多。去年Kristof說，布希政府作的似乎比MTV電視台還少—因為MTV當時還有一個運動，呼籲年輕人關心這個議題。除了MTV之外，還有喬治可魯尼和Angelina Jolie，他們都已經去過達佛地區。還有一個十二歲小女孩。（見附文）


4布希政府近來已經展開更積極的行動。但是你可能還不知道，阻礙國際介入的最大障礙是中國。中國賣的Ak-47步槍是蘇丹軍事政權殺人的武器------中國賣大量武器，從步槍到直昇機給蘇丹政府，而中國政府阻止一切在聯合國對蘇丹的制裁。
為什麼？因為蘇丹的石油有六成到七成是賣給中，而佔中國石油進口的十分之一。中國也是蘇丹最大的貿易伙伴。而石油外交，是中國現在外交政策最主要的課題。


5.我在寫最後一點時，想說一定會有人認為我是反中。這是無聊的指控。而且中國的角色，是國外任何對蘇丹問題的分析都不可避免提到的，但是中國媒體和台灣媒體似乎都忽略了。
不過，中國的民間社會與blogger不是可以和其他國家的民間社會，一起來要求他們政府多付出努力嗎？

附註：
美國的PBS網站有非常好的資料
如果要看中文，可以看BBC中文網的相關新聞


附上N.Kristof的兩篇文章，一篇是講民間的努力，一篇是講與中國的關係

Heroes Of Darfur
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The New York Times
May 7, 2006 Sunday


For three grueling years, Eric Reeves has been fighting for his life, struggling in a battle with leukemia that he may eventually lose. And in his spare time, sometimes from his hospital bed, he has emerged as an improbable leader of a citizens' army fighting to save hundreds of thousands of other lives in Darfur.

Pressure from that citizen army helped achieve a breakthrough on Friday: a tentative peace deal between the Sudanese government and the biggest Darfur rebel faction, brokered in part by U.S. officials. We should be skeptical that this agreement will really end the bloodshed -- past cease-fires and promises have not been honored -- but also rejoice in a glimpse of sun over the most wretched place in the world today.

If the violence does diminish -- and that will take hard work in the months and years ahead -- part of the credit will go to Mr. Reeves, a scholar of English literature at Smith College who has used an arsenal of e-mail messages, phone calls and Web pages to battle the Sudanese government and American indifference. He was the first person I know to describe the horrors of Darfur as genocide, and he financed his quixotic campaign by taking out a loan on his house.

Perhaps the most striking distinction in the history of genocide is not between those who murder and those who don't, but between ''bystanders'' who avert their eyes and ''upstanders'' who speak out. Professor Reeves has been a full-time upstander on Sudan since 1999, back when the people being slaughtered there were Christians in the south of the country. He noticed immediately in 2003 that Sudan had diversified into butchering Muslims in Darfur, and his frantic blowing of the whistle helped alert me and others. Visit his Web site, sudanreeves.org, but be careful -- his fury may set your computer smoking.

I don't agree with every bit of Mr. Reeves's analysis, and sometimes I flinch at his stridency. But there's no better excuse for stridency than genocide.

While Darfur has been incredibly depressing, the grass-roots movement in this country to stop the genocide is immensely inspiring. (To join, go to Web sites like www.savedarfur.org or www.genocideintervention.net.) The activist kids just bowl me over: girls like Rachel Koretsky, a 13-year-old who organized a rally in Philadelphia, distributed circulars and conducted a raffle to raise money for Darfur as her bat mitzvah charity project. So far, Rachel has raised $14,000 for Darfur.

Or kids like Tacey Smith, a 12-year-old in the farm town of Gaston, Ore. After seeing the movie ''Hotel Rwanda,'' she formed a Sudan Club with a few friends and has raised $400 for Darfur by selling eggs, washing cars and asking for donations instead of birthday presents. Her best friend's Christmas present to her was raising $50 for Darfur. Now Tacey is organizing a Darfur fair next month.

President Bush has been more active lately on Darfur, and without the administration's relentless pushing the peace deal on Friday would have been impossible. But by and large, there has been a vacuum of leadership on Darfur over the last few years, and ordinary Americans -- particularly young people -- have tried to fill it. I don't know whether to be sad or inspired that we can turn for moral guidance to 12-year-olds.

Then there are the entertainers. Frankly, I think it's bizarre that we turn to movie stars for guidance on international relations. But in this case, I bow low to George Clooney, who had the guts to travel to the Darfur area last month, and to Angelina Jolie, who has visited the Darfur area twice and is pushing for action on Darfur more forcefully than almost anyone in Washington.

It gets weirder: ''CBS Evening News'' decided that genocide wasn't newsworthy, devoting only two minutes to coverage of Darfur in all of 2005 -- but there's excellent coverage on MTV's university network and in episodes of the TV show ''E.R.'' set in Darfur. And one of the best presentations of life in Darfur is in an extraordinary video game developed with help from MTV and available free at www.darfurisdying.com. In the game, you're a Darfuri, trying to survive as Sudan's janjaweed militias hunt you down.

So that's how the response is unfolding to the first genocide of the 21st century: a video game is one of the best guides to understanding the slaughter, and our moral vacuum is filled by teenyboppers and movie stars.

Someday we will look back at this motley army of children and celebrities, presided over by a man struggling with leukemia, and thank them for salvaging our national honor.



China and Sudan, Blood and Oil
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
New York Times
April 23, 2006

Americans make a habit of bashing China for all the wrong reasons.

It's hypocritical of us to scream at President Hu Jintao, as we did during his visit last week, about China's undervalued currency. Sure, that's a problem for the world economy -- but not nearly as much as our own budget deficits, caused by tax cuts we couldn't afford.

We're now addicted to capital from China and other foreign countries, and that should be a concern. But our deficits aren't China's fault, and junkies like us don't have any basis to complain about the moral turpitude of those who supply cheap capital or other narcotics.

But there are two good reasons to complain to President Hu. First, he has presided over a broad clampdown on freedom of expression in China, including the imprisonment for 19 months of my colleague Zhao Yan, an employee of The New York Times.

Second, China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot's Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan's pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47's have been the main weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand people in Darfur so far, and China has protected Sudan in the U.N. Security Council.

Indeed, it's because of China's support that Sudan felt it could get away this month with sending a proxy army to invade neighboring Chad.

For more than two years now, I've been holding President Bush's feet to the fire over his refusal to make the Darfur genocide a priority for his administration. But Mr. Bush has taken half-steps in the right direction -- including pushing President Hu to cooperate on Darfur -- and that's more than can be said of the leaders of most other countries. Europe has snored through this genocide. Then there's the Arab League, which met last month in Sudan, in effect legitimizing the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Muslims (almost all the victims in Darfur are Muslim).

As Fatema Abdul Rasul wrote in The Daily Star of Lebanon this month: ''For the entire Muslim and Arab world to remain silent when thousands of people in Darfur continue to be killed is shameful and hypocritical.'' Do you hear that, Hosni?

And where's the Arab press? Isn't the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?

The biggest obstacle to forceful action is China. The latest outrage came a few days ago when the U.S. and Britain tried to impose the most feeble possible sanctions -- targeting just four people, including a midlevel Sudanese official. China and Russia blocked even that pathetic action.

Why is China soft on genocide?

The essential reason is oil. China traditionally was self-sufficient in oil, but since 1993 it has been a net oil importer and it is increasingly worried about this vulnerability.

So China has been bustling around the globe trying to ensure oil supplies from as many sources as possible. And partly because most of the major oil fields are already taken, China has ended up with the world's thugs: Sudan, Iran and Myanmar. China has been particularly active in Africa.

About 60 percent of Sudan's oil flows to China, and Beijing has a close economic and even military relationship with Khartoum. A recent Council on Foreign Relations report on Africa notes that China has supplied Sudan with small arms, anti-personnel mines, howitzers, tanks, helicopters and ammunition. China has even established three arms factories in Sudan, and you see Chinese-made AK-47's, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns all over Darfur.

Last month in a village on the Chad-Sudan border, I interviewed a man who told how a Sudanese militia had grabbed his baby boy, Ahmed Haroun, thrown Ahmed to the ground and shot him in the chest. The odds are overwhelming that that gun and those bullets came from China.

Likewise, the women and children I've seen torn apart by bullets in Darfur and Chad -- that lead and steel was molded in Chinese factories. When women are raped and mutilated in Darfur, the gun barrels pointed at their heads are Made in China.

Let's hope China's 13 million bloggers take up this issue, for this has received very little attention in China but it is not so sensitive that discussion of it will get anyone arrested.

One of the central questions for the 21st century will be whether China's rise will be accompanied by increasingly responsible behavior in its international relations. Darfur is a test, and for now China is failing.