Summonsed by Bell: spinning against Israel in the name of Britain's Christians

'For the latest comments on Israel from Christian Aid see:

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/christian.aid.fears.for.ngos.in.israel/25917.htm

'Does Mr Grumpy have anything to say about this?'

- asks commenter David.

Well, David, due to the way the portfolios have been divvied up here I'm afraid you'll have to make do with the Nick Clegg to Grumpy's Cameron. Rest assured, though, that my remarks have been cleared by the big boss.

So, yes, meet William Bell, Christian Aid's "Advocacy Officer for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory". The man, in other words, who, with the blessing of my church (and forty others large and small), has a full-time job spinning against the Jewish state. David, I hardly know what to say (apart from everything I've been saying here for the past five years).

I'd just like to know what makes William Bell tick. Perhaps he will stumble on this and enlighten me. Does he ever turn on the radio in the morning and think "Gosh, those poor people in Tibet/Burma/Zimbabwe/Darfur... They could really do with a bit of advocacy. I'll have a word with the boss and see if I can talk him into broadening my job description."?


Or does he wake up every morning saying to himself, "What a dream of a job mine is. For if I wasn't able to speak out against the Most Evil State in the World, who else would?"?

And if that's the way it is, if it isn't about Jews, what is it about?

This particular effort from Mr Bell reveals quite a lot about the way he operates. Like any good lobbyist he can take any story and spin it on his clients' favour. Here the starting point is Israel's admission to the OECD. I'd say this accolade for the country's thriving economy was something to celebrate, on the whole. But for Mr Bell the Israeli glass is half empty at the very best. Not a proper democracy, he mutters. Unlike all those proper democracies for which the rest of the Middle East is famed. Again, I'd say it's little short of a miracle that Israel has stayed democratic through 60 years of staving off threats to its existence. No credit given by Mr Bell, though: "civil society [...] under threat [...] repression [...] intimidation [...] undermine human rights defenders [...]". Etc etc.

Does Christian Aid ever condemn Sudan, or any of the world's despotisms, in anything like these forthright terms?

I tried googling "Christian Aid Sudan repression". The first hit was the paid-for Christian Aid Week link. The second was an item on Ethiopia with a passing reference to Christian Aid. The third was a press release from the Disasters Emergency Committee, of which Christian Aid is of course a prominent member. It was issued in 2004. Of criticism of the Sudanese government there is not one word.

A little further down the list came Christian Aid's Sudan page. Still no word of criticism of the government. Maybe it's on the linked "Our work on conflict" page? Oh dear. We learn that they deliver urgent aid in Darfur, however:-

'But our experience has also told us that our response to conflict needs to be even more far-reaching than the delivery of humanitarian assistance, however important that may be.'

That's the lead in to a section headed "Speaking out". So this must be where they've put the hard-hitting criticism of the Sudanese regime, right? Wrong. Six paragraphs: one on Colombia, one general, four on... need I continue?

After this you won't be too surprised to learn that there is no Christian Aid Advocacy Officer for Sudan. And with that, back to William Bell.

What is it that has triggered Mr Bell's doom-laden pronouncements on the state of Israeli democracy? Simply this: there are moves afoot in the Knesset to limit the political activities of NGOs like, well, Christian Aid. Not, be it noted, that any laws have been passed; that it's even being talked about is enough.

NGOs in Israel enjoy freedoms which would be inconceivable under any dictatorship. That, of course, is one major reason why the BBC website tells us more about Israeli human rights abuses, real or otherwise, than those of any of the world's dictatorships (than all of the world's dictatorships put together, is the impression I often get). Every time anyone in B'Tselem blows their nose a BBC stringer is on hand with tape recorder running.

Israel is also remarkably tolerant of international NGOs coming to the country to pursue anti-Israel political agendas. Sometimes somebody is refused admission and headlines are made, but these are exceptions that prove the rule. I've written a lot about the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, a Christian Aid partner and in effect a training programme for anti-Israel propagandists. Their volunteers may face some hurdles in getting into Israel, but get in they do.

So whilst a retreat from this openness would certainly be cause for concern, it would also be comprehensible. It would be directly related to the way Israel's openness has been abused by NGOs like Christian Aid, the way they take the soft option of giving democratic Israel a hard time whilst mutely bending the knee to tyrants.

Here's a reminder of how much open scrutiny of their human rights Israel's enemies tolerate. Simple but effective: if you're going to do something unpleasant, make sure no journalists are watching. True, you might not be able to suppress the story completely. But there won't be any tear-jerking eyewitness accounts or any of those pictures that speak a thousand words. Obviously it also helps that because you're Hamas you can rely on the Beeb to insert a sideswipe at Israel by way of "balance".

So where was Christian Aid when Hamas were bulldozing poor people's shacks?

From just across the border comes another recent story, taking us back to that booming economy that's won Israel a seat at the OECD. A reminder of who's benefitting and who isn't - and why.

It's only a privileged minority of the human race that can afford to turn up its noses at a thousand dollars a month for picking coriander, even if it comes at the slight risk of falling victim to a rocket attack. It's good money in Thailand and it's good money in Gaza. It's certainly more than enough to ensure you won't need to look to Christian Aid to provide your next meal.

And it's money that used to flow into the Gazan economy. Until?

'But until the start of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2000 when Israel tightened the border, thousands of Gazans used to travel daily through Erez to work on Israeli farms.'

Those smooth euphemisms for the campaign of mass murder directed at Israel's civilian population. Of course Israel turned off the flow of potential suicide bombers. What country on earth would not have done so? And now the Thais are doing the jobs Israelis won't do while Gaza has 40% unemployment. It's called shooting yourself in the foot - or it is if you think that the foot and the finger on the trigger have the same owner. If, that is, you count Hamas as the legitimate democratic representatives of the people of Gaza. What do you say, Mr Bell?

Palestinians 314, Darfuris 0: War on Want's victimhood league table

Here's a comment I've left on a post from Engage:-

'WoW is George Galloway's former outfit, of course, so there are no surprises here. If you do a search for 'Palestine' on their website you'll currently get 314 hits. Hits for 'Darfur': 0. Yes, honestly, zero. If you don't believe me, try it.'

- which you can do with minimum effort by clicking here and here.

Engaging with Sudan

Just one more teeny, weeny post on Teddy Mo.

Howard Jacobson wrote about Gillian Gibbons in last Saturday's Indie. Round here we worship the ground under Mr Jacobson's feet. And I can certainly concur with him that Ms Gibbons seems irritatingly naive, though to be fair I suspect that people possessing the kind of worldly wisdom which he finds wanting in her generally don't become primary school teachers.

What's bothering me is the attitude encapsulated here:-

'It is foolhardy in general to be unaware that a foreign country is a foreign country: that they do things differently there. And it is foolhardy in particular not to know that Islamic countries are in ferment at the moment – Sudan more than most – and that, as an English person not least, you run the risk of getting yourself into trouble whatever you say. Myself, I have difficulty understanding why, just for the fun of it, any Westerner would venture into that part of the world right now.'

This seems to me to come close to saying that anyone blessed with the faculty of premeditation would simply steer clear of Sudan. And that has to be wrong.

HJ is a friend of Engage. He was on the platform at their anti-boycott bash in London earlier this year. Good on him. And I'd like to put it to him that if there's one people who need the rest of the world's engagement, it's surely the Sudanese. A large minority, of course, are not Muslim (Ms Gibbons' school was a Christian foundation), and the Muslims are not all Islamist fanatics. Precious few of them had any hand in choosing the government (which richly deserves all the boycotts anyone cares to throw at it).

Getting down to specifics, if nothing else Ms Gibbons has left a class of children who may, sooner or later, ask themselves some questions about the way their teacher was treated.

So please think again, Mr Jacobson - you wouldn't want to be inconsistent, would you?

Bears of little brain

'This sad little Sudanese tale is part of a larger story, from the Rushdie affair to the storm over the Danish cartoons, in which some Muslims, and some Muslim governments, seem to be almost searching for slights and fights, to be almost determined to be insulted, pushing aside those ready to take a more tolerant and relaxed view.

'There are objective reasons why Muslims are now more prickly about their rights and about what non-Muslims say about them than they used to be. But the resulting process is one in which the lines which non-Muslims must not cross are being repeatedly redefined, always more restrictively, at times with dire penalties threatened. The majority of Muslims may be much less concerned than the activists and radicals, but it is the activists and radicals who often set the pace. This constant raising of the bar does not increase respect for Islam but instead makes it appear coercive and threatening. In Sudan, it is not the bear which is of little brain.'

You can push even the Grauniad (for that, believe it or not, is the source of the above) too far. Norm comments perceptively.

A major reservation: the last sentence only follows from the one before on the assumption that the Sudanese government's concern is with increasing respect for Islam. On the contrary, it is very happy to appear coercive and threatening, because that is precisely what it is.

In the deepest and truest sense

As my spiritual leader speaks out, the Teddy Mo affair continues to render satire redundant:-

'ABC: Well as I’ve said I don’t think the Sudanese government has done itself any favours with this, as indeed with other policies of theirs in recent years. It would be very good if this sentence were in some ways set aside, if Julie [sic] Gibbons were allowed to return home promptly. I think everyone here is bound to be thinking with enormous compassion and sensitivity, and indeed some indignation about her situation. I hope she knows how strongly she’s supported and how many people are bearing her in mind at this time.'

A Bear Named Mo

I keep pinching myself, but I really do seem to be awake and registering the real world.

Good news from the Beeb, though...

'Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, also said it appeared to have been a "quite horrible misunderstanding" and Ms Gibbons should never have been arrested.

'There was no apparent intention to offend Islamic sensibilities or defame the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad, he said.'

So there are circumstances when it would have been a non-horrible correct understanding, but - apparently, at least - they don't apply. Thank you for setting our minds at rest, Mr B.

Also, don't miss the Beeb's po-faced disquisition on the theology of soft toy naming.

As ever, the defaming of the honour and name of poor old Mo is in the capable hands of folk who call themselves his followers. Memo to Ed Husain: when things like this happen nobody needs Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Martin Amis to tell them that there's a problem. I have great respect for you, Ed; how much I respect your religion depends on how representative of it people like you are. Please don't go down the blind alley of trying to blame its image problem on a conspiracy of Islam-bashers.

Congo, Darfur, Palestine: the numbers game and the politics of racial blame

It's not every day that someone who's had a book published by the Social Affairs Unit also gets an article published in the Guardian. This distinction has, however, been enjoyed by one Roger Howard, author of What's Wrong with Liberal Interventionism and now of a piece entitled 'Where anti-Arab prejudice and oil make the difference'.

Googling suggests that it is the SAU which is Mr Howard's natural habitat. So what's the pay-off for the Guardian?

The place where anti-Arab prejudice and oil make the difference is Darfur. Howard's thesis is that a simplistic racist narrative of the conflict there is being invoked to serve at least three purposes: firstly to justify an intervention in Darfur actually motivated by western economic interests; secondly to give indirect reinforcement to the racist scapegoating of Arabs for the Israel-Palestine conflict; and thirdly to provide a diversion from the disastrous outcome of the invasion of Iraq. He seeks to prove the point that professed concern over Darfur is hypocritical and self-serving by drawing a comparison between western attitudes to two African conflict zones: Darfur and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In a nutshell, in the latter the killing is on a much larger scale, and yet it is almost totally ignored by western media and public opinion. Why? No oil to grab, no Arabs to blame.

There are some fairly obvious problems with this comparison. Crucially, Howard's rigged the evidence by homing in on Darfur rather than looking at the Sudanese regime's record in relation to the country as a whole. Once you add the 1.5 million dead in the 20-year conflict in the South to the 200,000 in Darfur, the contrast with the 3-4 million killed in the DRC isn't so very glaring any more. These are two human rights catastrophes on a massive scale, and using the numbers to play one off against the other is a less than appropriate response - both should be at the top of the international community's agenda.

One might also note that the DRC does actually have rich mineral resources, and that there has in fact been a limited intervention there: a UN peacekeeping force helped enable the holding of a presidential election last year which was successful to the extent that the loser accepted that he had been fairly beaten (there are, of course, no presidential elections in Sudan). Sad to say, the fighting continues regardless.

None of which makes it any less true that the DRC conflict is shamefully ignored. It's hard to disagree with Howard when he explains this by characterizing it as a conflict in which 'black Africans are killing other black Africans in a way that is difficult for outsiders to identify with'. Crudely, one might say that the Right isn't interested because the victims are Africans and the Left isn't interested because the killers are Africans. And it's plainly true that we would hear a lot more if there were any significant great power interests at stake. The typical vicious circle operates where media coverage is concerned. Reporting from the combat zones would be immensely arduous and dangerous. Who wants to take that on just so as to file copy that gets spiked before it has time to settle on the editor's desk, because the DRC is a far away country of which we know little? And the less we are told the less we demand to know more.

Howard's call for this to change would be laudable - if that were what he was saying. But that's not the point at all. In fact the DRC per se doesn't seem to interest Howard very much. He certainly has nothing whatsoever to offer in the way of positive suggestions as to what the rest of the world could do. As per the title of his book, he doesn't believe in 'liberal interventionism', and what is the use of demanding that more attention be paid to a situation we can do nothing to change?

Really the DRC seems only to serve only a rhetorical function in the article. The comparison is drawn not in order to draw attention to the DRC but to draw it away from Darfur. Having served its turn the DRC can be re-consigned to oblivion, as Howard directs our gaze to... wait for it... that most scandalously neglected region of the globe, the Middle East!

Here's the passage in which he makes the switch:-

'In Darfur the fighting is portrayed as a war between black Africans, rightly or wrongly regarded as the victims, and "Arabs", widely regarded as the perpetrators of the killings. In practice these neat racial categories are highly indistinct, but it is through such a prism that the conflict is generally viewed.

'It is not hard to imagine why some in the west have found this perception so alluring, for there are numerous people who want to portray "the Arabs" in these terms. In the United States and elsewhere those who have spearheaded the case for foreign intervention in Darfur are largely the people who regard the Arabs as the root cause of the Israel-Palestine dispute. From this viewpoint, the events in Darfur form just one part of a much wider picture of Arab malice and cruelty.

'Nor is it any coincidence that the moral frenzy about intervention in Sudan has coincided with the growing military debacle in Iraq - for as allied casualties in Iraq have mounted, so has indignation about the situation in Darfur. It is always easier for a losing side to demonise an enemy than to blame itself for a glaring military defeat, and the Darfur situation therefore offers some people a certain sense of catharsis.'

I want to draw attention to some things that are not said here.

Firstly, setting up and implicitly knocking down a straw man of racial prejudice gives Howard a neat way to evade the question whether the particular as-it-happens Arabs who rule Sudan are guilty of malice and cruelty bordering on genocide, and whether the particular as-it-happens Arabs who deliberate in the Arab League are guilty of disgraceful collusion with malice and cruelty through their uncritical support for the Sudanese regime. No, if Darfur bothers you, you must hate Arabs, if it doesn't you're OK. It's a rather extraordinary piece of moral inversion.

Secondly, there's the way Howard has suddenly stopped playing the numbers game. 200,000 civilians dead in Darfur? Chickenfeed compared with the millions in the DRC! So when he turns to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with between 4,000 and 5,000 Palestinians (civilians and combattants) dead since the second intifada began in 2000, he will naturally want to make the point that in comparative terms this hardly registers on the radar at all, and to ask why so much of the world is so obsessed with it, won't he? Strangely, though perhaps not altogether surprisingly, the answer is No. Apparently the rules of the numbers game state that it may be played for the benefit of the Sudanese regime and Arabs generally, but not for the benefit of Israel or the Jews.

Thirdly, consider this:-

'In Israel and Palestine the fighting is portrayed as a war between Arab Palestinians, rightly or wrongly regarded as the victims, and "Jews", widely regarded as the perpetrators of the killings. In practice these neat racial categories are highly indistinct, but it is through such a prism that the conflict is generally viewed.

'It is not hard to imagine why some in the Muslim world have found this perception so alluring, for there are numerous people who want to portray "the Jews" in these terms [...] who regard the Jews as the root cause of the Israel-Palestine dispute. From this viewpoint, the events in Palestine form just one part of a much wider picture of Jewish malice and cruelty.'

Sound familiar? With fiendish cunning, I've changed the names in part of the passage I've just quoted from Howard, which in its pristine form refers to Darfur. The point here is that there are two competing narratives of racial blame and demonization available as explanations of the 'root cause' of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Howard rightly rejects one of them; he could have done so in terms that rejected such racist discourse on principle, affirming instead that this conflict is no less complex and confused than that in Darfur. But he doesn't, and by this omission he leaves open the possibility that a picture of Jewish malice and cruelty provides the correct diagnosis of the conflict's root causes.

I'm not saying he positively endorses this view - he doesn't. But he doesn't explicitly reject it either, although he must of course know that many, many people do indeed think this way, and also that nowadays one cannot assume that such people do not read the Guardian.

So, three significant omissions. They bother me, but apparently not the folk at the Guardian. And if he'd filled in the blanks, would they still have printed his article? These days narratives of racial blame have their uses, even for the Left.

More killers

This doesn't sound much like an accident, either. Never mind, though, I'm sure Archbishop Tutu will be along soon to sort it all out.

A letter to the Independent

Published today. Provoked by the letters here and here...

'Sir: I find your letters page increasingly disturbing. It seems you have no problem with publishing letters accusing Israel of being a genocidal Nazi state provided you balance them with a roughly equal number of letters pointing out that this is nonsense. Thus does a notion that belongs on the lunatic fringe creep stealthily into the mainstream. The 'Nazi' tag appears to require no justification beyond evidence that injustice has been done and the writer's feelings of indignation.

'Meanwhile the butchers of Khartoum go about their business undisturbed by censure from your readers. If you publish this letter it will be the second containing the word "Darfur" in the last three months.'

The second paragraph got the chop. I suppose I must be charitable in view of the fact that the paper ran a major Darfur feature today, but I can't help feeling that was all the more reason to leave it in.

School's out, there's a war on

'Education in Southern Sudan is almost non-existent,
due to over two decades of war. More than 1.5 million
people have been killed and about four million forced
to flee to the north or to other countries. Many of
them have still not been able to return.The education
system and infrastructure have been totally destroyed.

'Over the last ten years, ad hoc education programmes
have been set up by local communities, NGOs and
faith-based organisations, but the Ministry of Education
is run by volunteers and teachers are untrained, unpaid
and often have had very little schooling themselves.
Going to school, for those children who do, means
sitting under a tree or in a grass hut, with no water
or toilets, without even the most basic teaching and
learning materials.

'The children of Southern Sudan have the least access
to primary education in the world. Around 20 per cent
of children enrol in school, with only 2 per cent
completing primary education.The situation is even
worse for girls. In a population of between six and
seven million, 500 girls finish primary school each year.

'Now that a separate government has been set up
and a fragile peace negotiated, people are beginning
to return to the south, placing an even greater strain
on a non-functioning education system.'

- from Save the Children's report 'Rewrite the Future: Education for children in conflict-affected countries' (pdf via StC and the BBC)

My gloss on this, which StC might or might not agree with, concerns the mainstream-media-eye view of the world. These are forgotten victims of a forgotten conflict - except that 'forgotten' is the wrong word since it was almost totally ignored by the media while it was raging.

Probably most of what I know about Darfur comes from the blogs I read regularly (honourable mention to Mick Hartley), but over the last few months the msm have finally started to wake up. The BBC website is reasonably good (I suspect the Nine O'Clock News is a different story, though) and the Telegraph's David Blair is outstanding (I never thought I'd live to see the day when I put 'Telegraph' and 'outstanding' into the same sentence).

That awakening never happened in twenty years of carnage in the South.

Darfur is Muslim on Muslim. The South was Muslim on non-Muslim. 1.5 million dead (some say 2 million) are quite a lot of exceptions to fit into the theory that the West is engaged in an anti-Muslim crusade. But you couldn't know that if you never read about them or saw them on TV.

The StC report mentions Palestine once for the sake of form - well, you have to keep the lefties happy. Of course the education problem exists there, but since it isn't isn't quantified you can be sure that it pales into insignificance in comparison with vast swathes of Africa. Vast, reporter-free swathes of Africa.

The Archbishop, Sudan and Israel

"The mechanisms by which international aid is delivered are so slow that the people of war-torn Southern Sudan, even a whole year after the peace agreement, are still waiting for basic aid, and too few voices are raised in the wealthy world to protest."

“In Darfur, neither national nor international forces have found a way of breaking the cycle of brutal violence and terror. Too many of us human beings, it seems, are content that death should be at work in others so long as our own life is unaffected.”

I suppose you could just about detect a criticism of the Sudanese government wrapped up in the second sentence. Though the implication that they are interested in even trying to break a cycle which they are in large measure responsible for setting in motion gives them a wholly undeserved benefit of the doubt. And though the really clear-cut denunciation is reserved for the 'rich world', charged with failing to throw enough money at a problem for which it bears essentially no direct responsibility at all. And though the last sentence promptly lets the Khartoum regime off the hook by expanding the sphere of blame to embrace human nature in general. We're all to blame!

Any reader enjoying even a passing acquaintance with the Church of England will not be surprised to learn that the quote emanates from an Anglican prelate. To be precise, it's from an Eastertide Letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

How should the C of E react corporately to the injustices of this world? Far be it from me to deny it its historic prerogative of well-meaning hand-wringing over human frailty. Equally, there is a place for fearless denunciation of specific misdeeds on the part of specific organizations, even accompanied by the threat of sanctions. But every time the horrors of Darfur call forth the former response, the singling out of Israel's war against terrorists for the latter approach becomes still more grossly offensive. Is there somewhere in the Archbishop's formidable brain an ethical big picture in which this contradiction is reconciled? If so, it really is time he shared it with the rest of us.

Genocide? It's just so nineties

The United Nations tried to suppress a report that named the alleged war criminals of Darfur, in a way that it would never have suppressed the names of alleged torturers at Guantanamo. On the blacklist was that friend of freedom, Mr Hussein. While he was ranting at the journalists, he said that if the UN sent troops to protect the people of Darfur, al-Qaeda would flood the country. ‘Darfur will become the graveyard for the United Nations,’ he promised with what sounded like inside knowledge.

Isn’t that an extraordinary threat for a UN member to make? Why isn’t every liberal newspaper and liberal party fulminating? Because genocide is out of fashion, dear. It may make a retro return in 2008, say, or 2009. Books called We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed will win literary prizes. Lachrymose documentaries will appear on BBC2, probably narrated by Fergal Keane. The Church of England will apologise, as it invariably does. They will all cry: ‘Never again!’ And at that precise moment, it will be happening again.

- from Nick Cohen's blistering commentary on the Archbishop of Canterbury's softly softly visit to Sudan.

This was in Sunday's Observer. I've written a lot about the Archbishop, and I really, really don't want it to degenerate into a personal vendetta. I thought if I waited a few days I might read something that would persuade me that Cohen was being unfair to him.

What I did read was his interview with Sir David Frost, conducted while he was still in Sudan, in which he found it possible to utter a clear-cut condemnation of Guantanamo Bay. The 'radical Christians' of Ekklesia are orgasmic. Sudan? No interest at all at the moment, but perhaps they will eventually find some way of blaming it all on George Bush. Whilst over at Thinking Anglicans the thinkers are not to be deflected from the Real Issues. Sudan? Isn't that on the same continent as that country where the Anglicans are so beastly towards gays?

Here is what the Archbishop told David Frost about Darfur:-

Darfur is still clearly a running sore. Nobody has a quick formula for sorting it out. I think the difficulty many people find, or sense they find here in Sudan, is a feeling that some of the donors outside Sudan are waiting for Darfur to clear up before they can fully deliver on promises for the south and although that’s not a completely accurate percentage, it’s sort of skewing things a bit here, I think.

...followed by this exchange:-

DAVID FROST: And what do you see as the future thus far, for Sudan – do you see it mainly as construction rather than reconstruction.

ROWAN WILLIAMS: It’s bound to be a future of construction, as I say infrastructure has to be put in place and there has to be, I think trust, in the national government. Because of the feeling of decades that basically the government has been run from the north for the north...

The Anglican Communion News Service, to its great credit, follows its lengthy report on the Archbishop's visit with some 'background notes', incuding this:-

According to STAND (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur),* the ethnic conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan has resulted in an estimated 400,000 deaths, 200,000 refugees in Chad, and 2.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs). The vast majority being ethnic-black African Darfurians, many from the three largest ethnic tribes of the Fur, Masaalit, and Zaghawa. Recent cycles of violence that the above statistics result from, began in February 2003 when two ethnic-African rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) attacked government outposts. The government of Khartoum (led by the National Congress Party, formerly the National Islamic Front) and its proxy Arab militias (the janjaweed) responded by targeting civilians, in addition to clashing with the rebel groups.

The US Government and others labelled the Sudanese government’s counter insurgency strategy as "genocide", while the UN and others determined Khartoum’s actions to be "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity". Amid this terminology, the international community has only meagrely addressed the issue of Darfur. Efforts have been made in three main areas in attempt to manage the conflict, heavily relying on the young African Union: peace negotiations, peace monitoring troops, and diplomatic, symbolic action. STAND believes that approximately 10,000 civilians continue to die each month due to violence, malnutrition and disease. The measures taken by the international community, who are the most capable, experienced and responsible actors in stopping the conflict - have been too little, too late.

That is the measure of what the Archbishop failed to say. The Telegraph is not my paper of choice, but on this question its Africa correspondent David Blair says it all:-

Sudan has precious few independent voices able to speak out about the horrors of Darfur. As a religious leader, Dr Williams has a licence to do so.

The fact that he chose to keep silent means that he has done the people of Sudan a great disservice.

Something worth protesting about

The latest from Sudan.

Letters to the Editor

A link to two letters in today's Independent. Eric Lee speaks very much for me in the controversy over sanctions against Israel. To adapt his final question and address it to Christian Aid: I know what you are doing to support the Israeli peace movement, but what are you doing to support Palestinians opposed to the militants?

Also, in the Independent, news that the Sudanese government has reacted to a report by Médecins Sans Frontières documenting hundreds of rapes by militiamen in Darfur province... by arresting one of MSF's workers (read it). The BBC has also covered this, but not so far the Guardian or the Times [1 June the Times has it, but still no word from the Guardian]. Try translating this story into a Middle East context and imagine the furore there would be if Paul Foreman were being held in an Israeli jail.

A Tale of Two Conflicts

Christian Aid News No. 25 (Summer 2004)

Credit where credit is due. Two pages – an appeal advert and a news feature – devoted to Sudan, one and a bit pages to Israel and Palestine. And acknowledgement that Sudan is, in the UN’s view, home to “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world”.

But when I compare the coverage of the two issues, it strikes me how very cautious Christian Aid is when it comes to politicizing the Sudan crisis. Describing the origins of the conflict in Darfur, the news feature tells us that it began with rebels taking up arms against the government. The rebels are described as “claiming that black Africans were being oppressed and Arabs favoured”, but this claim is not evaluated. The government is then said to have “responded” to rebel attacks by mobilizing the Janjaweed militia.

Where Israel and Palestine are concerned, the oppression of the Palestinians is never a “claim”, but an objective reality. Israeli security measures are repeatedly condemned without any acknowledgement that they are a response to terrorist violence.

Missing from both the appeal advert and the news feature is any mention of the death toll in Darfur – estimated by some at around 300,000. Also absent is any call for the international community to put pressure on the Sudanese government.

The Holy Land feature is a guest column by Baroness Shirley Williams. This is scarcely a counterweight to the standard Christian Aid line: lots of criticism of the occupation and Israel’s security policies, no mention of the terrorist violence which the latter are responding to. But at least she does concede that “Israel is a vibrant democracy, with a Supreme Court of remarkable independence”. These are facts which do not normally find a place in Christian Aid News. One might add in passing that the vibrant democracy is vibrant and democratic enough to enfranchise the nearly 20 per cent minority of the population who are Arabs.