Kristof on Gates

By Nicholas Kristof

My Sunday column is about Bill Gates and his first annual letter, which will be released Monday. You can sign up for it or read it on the Gates Foundation site, and by all means also take a look at the video of parts of my conversation with Gates.
It’s well worth reading in full for what it says about health, development and education. It’s largely aimed at elites — that’s you — and I do hope the Gates Foundation will figure out more ways to market its issues to the general public so as to help build more of a social movement for these causes.
On the whole, I am so impressed with what the Gates Foundation is doing, particularly in global health. It has managed to focus scientific research on the diseases of poverty and galvanize an effort that will probably culminate in life-saving vaccines. If some of these big bets pay off — say, a malaria vaccine — then the impact on Africa will be incalculable, and the benefit will be seen in economic growth as well as lives. My hunch is that Bill Gates is going to be remembered more for what he did in health than what he did in software.
Discussions about Gates always tend to migrate into discussions of aid effectiveness, and there are serious questions about how well aid works. But I should also note that the two areas that have the best track record in aid are health and education, and perhaps the two single most cost-effective interventions ever were the campaign that eradicated smallpox and the battle against childhood mortality led by James P. Grant of Unicef beginning in 1980. So, sure, I grant that aid often doesn’t work as well as is hoped — but sometimes its successes are simply spectacular.
In the letter, Gates notes that he and Melinda started off focusing on reproductive health, apparently thinking that family planning was the crucial barrier. That is indeed a problem for hundreds of millions of women (and one reason I’m delighted that Obama has restored funding to the U.N. Population Fund). But Bill and Melinda realized that it’s more complicated than a technical matter of providing contraception: when families expect several children to die of diarrhea, measles or malaria, then they want more children, and throughout history the first step has been to reduce childhood mortality and then fertility soon drops as well. If poor people can be assured that their children will survive, they will have fewer children. That’s one reason Bill and Melinda Gates moved their focus from reproductive health to global disease — and the results may be truly historic.

1800-GENOCIDE

Darfur, Another Year Later

NYTimes Editorial, 12.10.08

In January, President Bush said this about Darfur: “My administration called this genocide. Once you label it genocide, you obviously have to do something about it.”

Yet, last week — nearly one year later — this is what the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told the United Nations Security Council about Darfur: “Genocide continues. Rapes in and around the camps continue. Humanitarian assistance is still hindered. More than 5,000 displaced persons die each month.” How can this still be?

The world has long declared its revulsion at the atrocities committed by Sudan’s government and its proxy militias in Darfur and done almost nothing to stop it. It took years of political wrangling to get the Security Council to approve a strengthened peacekeeping force with deployment set for Jan. 1. More than 11 months later, the Security Council has managed to send only 10,000 of the promised 26,000 peacekeepers. Large-scale military attacks against populated areas continue.

Much of the fault lies with Sudan’s cynically obstructionist president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. But Russia and especially China — which has major oil interests in Sudan — have shamefully enabled him. So have African leaders. The United States and its allies also bear responsibility for temporizing, most recently over how to transport troops and equipment to the conflict zone.

President Bush said on Wednesday that the United States was prepared to provide airlift. So why has this taken so long?

Now, the war crimes charges Mr. Moreno-Ocampo has brought against the Sudanese leader for his role in masterminding Darfur’s horrors (the burning of villages, bombing of schools and systematic rape of woman) may — may — be changing the calculus in Khartoum.

Mr. Bashir recently agreed to peace talks mediated by Qatar and pledged to punish anyone guilty of crimes in Darfur. Until proved otherwise, the world must assume that all of this is theater designed to fool the Security Council into delaying his reckoning at the Hague.

The African Union and the Arab League, seeking to protect one of their own, are pressing the Security Council to delay a formal indictment and arrest warrant, saying it would hurt chances for a negotiated peace. The Bush administration has threatened to block such a move and we hope it stands firm. President-elect Barack Obama and his advisers have called for strong action to end the Darfur genocide. We hope the next administration moves quickly. But have no doubt: Fixing Darfur, which is increasingly engulfed in inter-rebel warfare, gets harder by the day. The indictment, expected in February, is undeniably deserved. United Nations officials say that up to 300,000 people have been killed in the Darfur conflict and that 2.7 million have been driven from their homes.

Still it might be worth delaying if Mr. Bashir called off his murderous militias, stopped obstructing deployment of a strengthened peacekeeping force and began serious peace talks. The world is waiting.

What can I do?
Call 1800-GENOCIDE.
Write a letter to your Senator.
Spread the word in our digital world.

Books Not Bombs

Books Not Bombs....a video report on the state of development in Pakistan, courtesy of
Nicholas Kristof and the NY Times.

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/11/22/opinion/1194833601777/books-not-bombs.html#

Odinga on Zimbabwe

After three members of The Elders were refused entry into Zimbabwe to observe the human rights situation and the overall deterioration of the country over the last months, Raila Odinga, Prime Minister of Kenya, remarked, ""The fact that Mugabe was a freedom fighter does not give him rights to own Zimbabwe and hang on to power."

This statement echoes loudly in the echelons of power in the African continent. Prior deeds, colonial conquests of previous decades, home grown revolutionary actions of the past, are often used as fodder for negligent and outright disgraceful leadership.

The test piece is Mr. Mugabe, who has clung to power, citing his role as an anti-imperialist revolutionary, while his country has completely deteriorated to the point of failed state. Once the breadbasket of the continent, Zimbabwe is now the basketacse. What a terrible shame.

While the politicans continue to bicker, the country crumbled; while Mugabe continues to plunder, the people starve and fall victim to curable disease. Jimmy Carter, one of The Elders refused entry into the country, remarked, "The crisis in Zimbabwe is much worse than anything we have imagined". What a terrible shame for humanity.

Power on Humanitarianism

Governments are guided primarily by national security and economic concerns, and large-scale suffering tends to register only when powerful domestic political constituencies force it onto the agenda...
History is laden with belligerent leaders using humanitarian rhetoric to mask geopolitical aims. History also shows how often ill-informed moralism has led to foreign entanglements that do more harm than good. But history shows the costs, too—in Rwanda and today in Darfur—of failing to prevent mass murder. The fate of future atrocity victims may turn on whether it is possible to find a path between blinding zeal and paralyzing perfectionism.

-Samantha Power, reviewing Gary Bass' Freedom's Battle

little has changed

Recent figures from Darfur, courtesy of The Economist, which reports, "For all the vast international effort put into improving the situation in Darfur, the thousands of UN and diplomatic man-hours and the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, little has changed."

About 2.7m people are now crowding into overflowing makeshift camps in Darfur itself, and about another 300,000 are in camps over the border in Chad. In all about 5m Darfuris, out of a population of 6m at the last official count in 2002, are either in camps or are relying on aid to survive. And as many as 300,000 have probably died as a result of the conflict.
Eleven humanitarian workers have been killed this year and 179 kidnapped. Some 237 aid vehicles have also been hijacked this year, already double the number for 2007. The UN in Darfur has moved to its highest level of alert before full evacuation. All non-essential staff have left.

Democracy is Dissent

The questioning of authority is the bedrock of our system of government, and thus, if our system of ideals. Cornell West stated in a recent interview, "Real hope is grounded in a particularly messy struggle." And in this new age of hope, of "Yes we can," of a retreat of the forces of destruction in our government, a new breed begins to take hold; a new breed taken from the same mold as the old breed, differing in color more than substance and interest, red to blue, white to black, greed is still exemplified by the same innate characteristics. A recycling of the Clintonian-era; are there not new, more capable minds, deserving of positions of power in this new era of government? Why are the same faces, the same names, the same entrenched interests, being dug up, propped up, again and again? Is this the change that we bargained and hoped and voted for?
West continued, "We must move from symbol to substance." We must move from the symbol of change, the symbol of a new era, to actually implementing this change and what this means for the country; we must resist the temptation to backslide, to give in to the same vested, entrenched interests that have so badly damaged this country and economy over the last number of years, who have created the bipolar social atmosphere which has the capability of igniting if not smothered with the decency demanded November 4th.

Is this the continuation of the Empire? Is this the continuation of American hegemony? Is the the continued grasping for a unipolar world, ignorant of the realities of the geopolitical realm? Is this the desperation of the vested interests and military-industrial complex as their global influence, and thus, life blood, diminishes?

Obama has been rumored to have picked Eric Holden to be his new Attorney General; Holden, a Clinton holdover, is also a manifestation of the corporate interests of the United States and their historical and continuing repression of indigenous and impovershed cultures and communities around the globe. He has recently been defending one of the worst human rights violating US companies, Chiquita, in its lawsuit against Columbian working familes who have been targeted by death squads, funded by the fruit company. This follows in a long line of US imperialism and malevolence in the region, fueled by the agricultural interests of our large fruit growers, think: The United Fruit Company and the overthrow of two central american countries, and the propping up of the "Banana Republics" of the region for decades.

Lets hope Obama really does represent the change promised; lets hope new minds can be brought to the forefront; lets hope we can learn from the mistakes of the past, and move forward, not backwards, into the future.


"You cant lead the people if you dont love the people. You cant save the people if you wont serve the people."
-Cornell West

Corruption in Angola

The BBC Reported that Anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International rated Angola one of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world in 2005, noting that like many countries with oil resources it faces "inexplicable poverty and deprivation".

Global Witness Reports:
The facts present a relatively stark case to the international community: at least $1 billion -- about a third of Angola’s total budget -- went missing last year. This missing money is about five times the $200 million that the United Nations barely managed to scrape together that year to feed one million internally displaced people dependent on international food aid.
Revenues from oil make up an estimated 90 percent of Angolan state income, yet they remain opaque. The government issues no clear figures and state oil companies remain unaudited and unaccountable.


Some startling stats from oil rich Angola:





In 2004, Human Rights Watch found the government could not account for US$4 billion spent between 1997 and 2002 Transparency International ranked Angola 142 out of 163 countries in the Corruption Perception Index just after Venezuela and before the Republic of the Congo with a 2.2 rating.

Virunga

The continuing saga of the Virunga Mountain Gorillas, caught in the crossfire of the raging violence in the east of Congo. The endagered mammals are on the brink, encapsulated by the

untold suffering of the world's most unstable region. I wrote about this awhile back, after being moved by the National Geographic cover story on the murder of ten of the mountain gorillas a year back. And the delicate thread continues to unravel.

http://jeffdow.blogspot.com/2008/10/link.html

From today's NYTimes International Section:

Eastern Congo is home to almost a third of the world’s last 700 wild mountain gorillas (the rest are in nearby areas of Rwanda and Uganda). Now, there are no trained rangers to protect them. More than 240 Congolese game wardens have been run off their posts, including some who narrowly escaped a surging rebel advance last month and slogged through the jungle for three days living off leaves and scoopfuls of mud for hydration.
“We figured if the gorillas can eat leaves, so can we,” said Sekibibi Desire, who is staying in a tent near the other rangers.
This is just the latest crisis within a crisis. Congo’s gorillas happen to live in one of the most contested, blood-soaked pieces of turf in one of the most contested, blood-soaked corners of Africa. Their home, Virunga National Park, is high ground — with mist-shrouded mountains and pointy volcanoes — along the porous Congo-Rwanda border, where rebels are suspected of smuggling in weapons from Rwanda. Last year in Virunga, 10 gorillas were killed, some shot in the back of the head, execution style, park officials said.

What can I do?

www.gorillafund.org

Angolagate

From Global Witness; the trials and tribulations of resource-rich Angola, a place where the outrageously-rich rub elbows with the devastatingly poor a place where the ruling elites have taken the concept of corruption to a new level; a place that is being courted by all global powers, eager to tap into the vast oil and diamond reserves contained in its territory. Global Witness does remarkable work in the arena of global corruption investigation...


Angolagate trial opens - Global Witness comment

Press Release – 03/10/2008

Angolagate trial - 3rd October 2008

Global Witness welcomes the start of the long awaited Angolagate trial taking place in Paris from October 6th 2008. This long running judicial investigation covers a dark period in Angola's turbulent and troubled history and dissects in intimate detail the geopolitical machinations of various nation states in the post cold war period. It will show how Russian, American and French geopolitical interests tangoed with a morally blind international banking and oil trading system to set up the looting of the Angolan state - which continues to this day to the overall detriment of the long suffering Angolan population.

Global Witness believes that for anything positive to come out of this politically embarrassing trial for the French and Angolan establishment, then lessons must be learned. Many of the key players in this decade long saga are still in positions of government and considerable power utilising the networks and financial systems that were established to covertly arm the ruling Angolan regime.

Key Angolan officials - from the President down - personally benefited to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks or bribes - usually described as ‘commissions'. Many of these officials still hold their governmental positions or have gone onto increase their personal power base ensuring that the Angolan state has become their own private business enterprise.

Commentators, regulators and law enforcement officials must look beyond the focus of the trial - the French political and corruption scandal - to the much bigger scandal of how a resource rich but desperately poor country had and is having its natural resources looted for the benefit of a small Angolan kleptocratic elite which included and includes key middlemen and corporate interests.

The banks, oil trading companies, financial institutions, regulators, arms procurement companies, offshore financial centres and governments that were involved in this sage must ensure that the middlemen and government officials that personally enriched themselves with the wealth of the Angolan state must not be allowed to do so again. A significant percentage of the Angolan population still have no access to clean water, education, food or medical attention which should be considered a crime against humanity for a country which is Africa's top oil producer.

EASTERN CONGO---DO SOMETHING!!!!

FOR CHRISTS SAKE, INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY, UNITED NATIONS, US, EU, AU, WHOEVER IS LISTENING------DO SOMETHING!!!!!
Have we learned NOTHING from our past? The United Nations has "expressed concern..." about the recent events in the east of Congo, around the city of Goma, where Tutsi rebel forces have dislodged the corrupt and inept Congolese Army forces. The historical rift and ethnic hatred, as well as the greed which plagues all, are all important factors in this renewed conflict; however, all factors need to be disregarded; the responsibility is to act, to avoid the talking points, to avoid the bureaucratic inertia of the past, which has allowed for the deaths of millions. Please stem the tide before it grows too large to control.

The region, historically unstable, is fast slipping into chaos. A country which has already lost FIVE MILLION people to war in the last decade. When will we act, not in our own self-interest, but in the interest of HUMANITY!!!!!

Small Steps, Big Steps

Michael Maniates, Allegheny College, on going green:

If we sum up the easy, cost-effective, eco-efficiency measures we should all embrace, the best we get is a slowing of the growth of environmental damage...obsessing over recycling and installing a few special light bulbs won't cut it. We need to be looking at a fundamental change in our energy, transportation and agricultural systems rather than technological tweakings on the margins, and this means changes and costs that our current and would-be leaders seem afraid to discuss. Which is a pity, since Americans are at their best when they are struggling together, and sometimes with one another, toward difficult goals....Surely we must do the easy thing: They slow the damage and themselves become enabling symbols of empathy for future generations. But we cannot permit our leaders to sell us short. To stop at "easy" is to say that the best we can do is accept an uninspired politics of guilt around a parade of uncoordinated individual action.

modern day slavery

A human life, a soul and a person, a lifetime's backbreaking toil and anguish, for $500.

50 years ago, slavery was outlawed in the international community; however, in many parts of the world, the age-old traditions of the past continue unabated. The international community must take an implacable and unified stance against the trade in human lives for the horrors, like those revealed in the West African state of Niger, to be condemmed to a darkened past.

December, 1948, The Universal Decalaration of Human Rights, on slavery:

Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.


from the NYTimes:

Slavery is outlawed throughout Africa, but it persists in pockets of Niger, Mali, Mauritania and amid conflicts like the one in northern Uganda. Antislavery organizations estimate that 43,000 people are enslaved in Niger alone, where nomadic tribes like the Tuareg and Toubou have for centuries held members of other ethnic groups as slaves.
Ms. Mani’s experience was typical of the practice. She was born into a traditional slave class and sold to Souleymane Naroua when she was 12 for about $500.
Ms. Mani told court officials that Mr. Naroua had forced her to work his fields for a decade. She also claimed that he raped her repeatedly over the years.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

18,000 a Day

NyTimes, Nicholas Kristof, 10/17/08....progress for the world's poor, quantified, a huge leap forward...

I know it: you’re looking at that headline and thinking, What terrible thing happens to 18,000 kids a day? What horror is Kristof going to inflict on us now?

But, no, this is good news. The latest World Health Report, just out from the World Health Organization, reports:

If children were still dying at 1978 rates, there would have been 16.2 million deaths globally in 2006. In fact, there were only 9.5 million such deaths. This difference of 6.7 million is equivalent to 18,329 children’s lives being saved each day.

One of the reasons there isn’t more support for foreign aid is the glum sense that places like Africa are tragic but hopeless, that poor countries are so corrupt and inefficient that it’s impossible to register progress. The report is a good antidote to that defeatism. Sure, aid is often inefficient and occasionally counter-productive, but on the other hand saving 18,000 children’s lives each day is quite an extraordinary achievement.

The World's Most Utterly Failed State

When observing the outcome of lawlessness, when anarchy is allowed to reach out and take a bite of the global world order, we need to understand what has created this anarchy, what has melded these precarious conditions, to rightfully prescribe a prescription for a future. We need to understand the past to comprehend and appreciate the future. And starkly, we must take responsibility for past actions that have contributed to the state of affairs today, as Somali pirates terrorize one of the world's busiest shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden. As per the Economist's report on Somalia this week, "...the outside world helped tip Somalia into chaos."
And chaos is now what the world order will need to help remedy, so the destabilizing factor does not spread in this already volatile of regions. Even more troubling, in this land of famine and complete lack of social services, is that the pirates have spawned the only viable industry; the take in ransoms dwarfs the rest of the economy in the region, and is now the only light and the end of many young, darkened, and dusty tunnels.

The descent of Somalia into anarchy was not a completely isolated, internal event; it was directly perpetrated by the outside world through negligence and outright interference, something the global powers have always excelled in. The last leader of Somalia, Siad Barre,
excelled at using the food aid of the west to prop up his corrupt and brutal dictatorship, often with the direct compliance of the West. Barre limped along in this manner for years, repressing the Somali people with sacks of grain stamped USAID. The US defended its staunch anti-communist ally in international forums, supplied him with hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to further repress his people, and directly related in the simmering of civil society which resulted in the violent overthrown and anarchy which have reigned in the Horn of Africa ever since. All for the small price tag of a US military base and severing ties with the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War.

Michael Maren detailed the state of affairs as Somalia crumbled, in his critical work, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of International Aid and Charity. Maren reported extensively from Somalia during the death throes of the Barre regime, and describes the role of international aid in the propping up of dysfunctional governments.

My experience in Beledweyne during the last few months has confirmed my growing suspicion that the Somali government is deliberately taking part in the diversion of refugee food, has deliberately inflated refugee figures in order to facilitate these diversions, and is now simply humoring donors by submitting itself to the impotent inspection and monitoring of these donors.
Our involvement in the refugee relief operation is a participation in a political ploy to gain support for an unpopular military government. I do not presume to influence the policy of the American government in this regard, however I believe that the situation should be recognized for what it is. Our continued support for the refugees makes possible continued activity of the WSLF in the Ogaden, which in turn results in more refugees...
There is a festering resentment among the general population towards the expatriates and the refugees. An old man stopped me on the streets of Beledweyne and demanded to know why he was not entitled to the rations and health care just because he had decided to settle in town instead of the refugee camp.
A man with four children working in Beledweyne for 800 shillings a month (an extraordinarily high salary) could not supply his family with the amount of food the refugees receive for free.
The future for refugees in the camps holds only years of relief. The efforts of the international community should be aimed at solving the problem-getting the refugees out of the camps. "

And in its present state, "...wretched as it is, Somalia can cause a lot of trouble-on land and at sea. It is a disaster that the rest of the world cannot shrug off."

The Military Industrial Complex, Act Two: Imperialism

"The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."
-Dwight Eisenhower, speaking on the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell address to the nation, January 1961.


The BBC News headline reads, "US Africom 'Has No Hidden Agenda.'", admitting their guilt with the first elementary denial. There has been decades of struggle and civil strife on the continent of Africa; millions of lives lost needlessly due, in part, to the aggressive non-attention of the Western world powers, with nary a government agency but USAID to hand out cooking oil and sacks of rice, emblazoned with the huge American flag. Rwanda, nothing. Congo, nothing. Sudan, next to nothing. Somalia, a half hearted effort, then nothing. Mozambique, nothing. In the cases that we have done more than nothing in the last decades since the Independence of Africa, it has meant fueling arms to "ideological partners" engaged in brutal civil wars, or assassinating democratically elected heads of state who do not fit our mold of the proper Central African Dictator.
So when the US finally acts to set up an African Central Military command, and says that they have "No Hidden Agenda," something smells fishy.
And something smelled fishy to the African heads of state who, despite the enormous leverage of US diplomatic pressure in the developing world, denied access to their soil for our military's newest foray into international affairs. All except Liberia, recently emerged from a decade of brutal civil war, and no doubt, scared senseless of slipping backwards into anarchy.
Which brings us to the unambiguously hidden agenda; OIL and NATURAL RESOURCES.

This is no secret. (See Fast Company's fantastic article on Africa's resource grab from May 2008...http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/126/special-report-china-in-africa.html)

The wars of the 21st century will be fought over all matters of resources; Africa will be one of the primary battlegrounds, with its rich deposits of Oil and Minerals, and weak,l corrupt governments little interested in unnecessary oversight. The wars of the 21st century are already being strategized on the ground in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, where governments remain blind to the dire needs if their people in the face of Chinese and American resource imperialism.

The scary fact emerges out of the haze of the last sixty years; we simply cannot compete with the Chinese economically at this point in time. We cannot underbid the Chinese, we cannot play dirty like the Chinese, we do not have the desire to work like the Chinese to procure what we still consider to be our natural right in the world; so we call on the old American bulwark, the men and women in our "All Volunteer Army" to do our dirty work, to project American power across the globe, to squeeze what remains of our share of the pie in the throes of the decline of the American Empire. When we can no longer compete economically, when we have outsourced the last of our jobs, when we can no longer package and repackage the same debt instruments to make money for the few at the expense of the masses, when the full faith in the American government does no longer cover our outstanding debts and obligations, we still have our boys in camo to project the semblance of power across the globe.

Hence, the Military Industrial Complex, Take Two.

When Eisenhower first warned of the policy relationships between the government, military, and corporations, our country was sitting on top of the world order, an undisputed superpower; we continue, vainly, in the same mind state, in an increasingly diminished state; soon, we will be a shell of a country, a shell made of Kevlar body plating, carrying an M-16 rifle and driving a big gas guzzling Humvee through the anarchic 21st century battlegrounds of Central Africa.

an increasingly militarized world

The recent debacle of Somali pirates hijacking a Ukranian ship carrying 30 new T-72 tanks, as well as loads of ammunition and rocket launchers for the Kenyan Army got me to thinking.
It got me to thinking that Kenya is one of the poorest countries in the world. A country constantly looking for handouts from the international community, a country whose bloated bureaucracy consumes $800 million dollars annually just to pay for the bloated government. Kenyan MP's are amongst the best paid in the world. The BBC reported recently, that in a country where the average income is less than $400...

Cabinet posts attract a monthly salary of nearly $18,000 (£9,000). Assistant ministers earn a bit less - just over $15,000.
The new prime minister and two new deputy prime ministers will be paid more. So salaries alone will cost the Kenyan taxpayer $1.5m a month.
Ministers and their assistants also get allowances - that adds another $210,000 a month to the bill.
To add insult to injury, the Kenyan exchequer only claws back a little in tax: only around $3,000 of the ministers' income is treated as taxable income.
It is impossible to put an accurate figure on the total burden, but these extra bonuses amount to a cash value of at least $13m a year, or to put it another way, enough to build around 50 new schools in Kenya.

Which brings us back to the military spending. In a country where the average person is barely surviving on less than $400 a year, the military spent $283 million dollars last year. Which brings us to the current debacle off the lawless coast of Somalia. A country that relies on food aid and development agencies to provide medical care to its citizens, a country where the annual educational budget is $30 million.

The Silent Crisis

"This is the silent crisis of developing countries. You never see a child die from education on TV, but make no mistake about it. Children die from lack of education all the time. Children are more likely to grow up and have HIV/AIDS, they are more likely to die in infancy or before the age of 5, particularly determined by the education of their mothers. So this is a life or death issue. There are 100million children who will not see the inside of a classroom this year.
This is a silent global crisis...today as we sit, there are more children out of school in
Africa as there are in school in the United States. Probably about 60% of the out of school
children are girls.

-Gene Sperling, Wide Angle: Back To School, PBS

A fascinating and fantastic documentary on Wide Angle concerning the state of education around the world, focusing on seven children in developing and developing countries, painting the stark contrast between the haves and the extreme have-nots in this world; showing the precariousness of the situations faced by so many of the very poorest in this world. The smallest burdens on a poverty stricken family can change the lives of the young; school fees of only a few dollars per year will change lives. Poverty can be so easily remedied, the fact that this is not being met is a disgrace; universal primary education is a global human right that needs to be met.

Kristof and Darfur

"Sudan’s government dispatches rapists the way other governments dispatch the police, the better to terrorize black African tribes and break their spirit."
-Nicholas Kristof, NY Times, 8/31/08


Nicholas Kristof illuminates a new book about the be released in the States entitled
"Tears of the Desert," the first memoir written by a female caught in the Darfur genocide.
The story comes from Dr. Halima Bashir, who has risked her life to publish this work, after first risking her life to treat young victims of the unspeakable brutalities being perpetrated by the Janjaweed in Darfur, Western Sudan.

Here's some of Kristof's article (masked in the cloak of an OpEd...but keep up the incredible work...Kristof is a fearless pioneer in journalism. He continually publishes human rights stories from the deepest, darkest corners of the world, stories that other major media outlets brush aside with a long pole; stories that stir the mind and trouble the heart. Stories that we should be hearing, stories that will create the outrage needed to stop the atrocities being committed by governments and rebel groups around the world. I applaud you, Nicholas Kristof, once again).

In 10 days, Halima’s extraordinary memoir will be published in the United States, at considerable risk to herself. She writes in “Tears of the Desert” of growing up in a placid village in rural Darfur, of her wonder at seeing white people for the first time, of her brilliant performance in school.

Eventually Halima became a doctor, just as the genocide against black African tribes like her own began in 2003. Halima soon found herself treating heartbreaking cases, like that of a 6-year-old boy who suffered horrendous burns when the state-sponsored janjaweed militia threw him into a burning hut.

One day she gave an interview in which she delicately hinted that the Darfur reality was more complicated than the Sudanese government version. The authorities detained her, threatened her, warned her to keep silent and transferred her to a remote clinic where there were no journalists around to interview her.

Then the janjaweed attacked a girls’ school near Halima’s new clinic and raped dozens of the girls, aged 7 to 13. The first patient Halima tended to was 8 years old. Her face was bashed in and her insides torn apart. The girl was emitting a haunting sound: “a keening, empty wail kept coming from somewhere deep within her throat — over and over again,” she recalls in the book.

Sudan’s government dispatches rapists the way other governments dispatch the police, the better to terrorize black African tribes and break their spirit. What sometimes isn’t noted is that many young Darfuri girls undergo an extreme form of genital cutting called infibulation, in which the vagina is stitched closed until marriage; that makes such rapes of schoolgirls particularly violent and bloody, increasing the risk of AIDS transmission.

Halima found herself treating the girls with tears streaming down her own face. All she had to offer the girls for their pain was half a pill each of acetaminophen: “At no stage in my years of study had I been taught how to deal with 8-year-old victims of gang rape in a rural clinic without enough sutures to go around.”