Friday, March 6, 2009

God bless the rains down in Africa

It's been a couple of days, but I did have to make a comment about the International Criminal Court issuing an indictment against Omar al-Bashir, and his immediate reaction to kick out ten NGOs providing aid to the Darfur region. Not surprisingly, Bashir thinks the indictment is a joke and instead claimed this was an attempt to impose "colonialism" against Sudan. Hmmm, where have we heard that expression before? Oh yeah ... Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. I'll get to him in a moment.

It's worth remembering that the civil war in Darfur isn't Christians versus Muslims, but rival Muslim factions. But religion shouldn't be an issue, humanity is humanity and deliberately displacing nearly three million people is a war crime even if a single person has not been killed. Of course, hundreds of thousands have been murdered, raped and tortured. Since Sudan won't deal effectively with its own leadership, since the rule of law doesn't exist in Sudan, then the world must act. With any luck, Bashir will drop in on the Vatican, which doesn't recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC -- and he and Ratzinger will play a marathon game of Texas hold em while millions continue to starve.

Enough. The moment any plane he is on is over international waters, a military escort should intercept it and send him straight to the Hague where he belongs. He is presumed innocent until proven guilty in that forum. If he is truly innocent, he should turn himself in voluntarily.

As for Zimbabwe -- very interesting that Mugabe's main rival and now Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, was involved in a motor vehicle accident today where he was injured and his wife was killed after their car ran into a tractor trailer. Can anyone believe it was really an accident, despite the poor state of repair of roads in the country? This looks very suspicious, even though Mugabe paid Tsvangirai a visit in the hospital. You just don't spend years trying to knock someone down only to suddenly make him your PM like that without having an ulterior motive.

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