To be shelved

Aught Seven, Act One, Scene One: Africa

This year, like last year, I hope to put out a trimester blog report on the affairs of the world (for my own benefit as much as for anyone else's). Last year I posted these reports as single blog entries, released in May, September and December. This year, in the interest of making the reports shorter (though I doubt they'll be sweeter), I'll roll them out in a series of seven posts released over the course of a week (again in May, September and December).

I'll start with three stories worth following in Africa (as I've said before, a lot of stuff is cut and pasted here directly from wikipedia, TIME, and Harper's Weekly Review):

1) After the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (Luis Moreno Ocampo of Argentina) filed charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity against Sudanese officials for the massacres in Darfur, Sudan's Minister of the Interior said that any party who tried to enforce the charges would be beheaded.
According to an April 15th article in the New York Times, the four-year-old crisis in Darfur (which began, roughly, at the same time as the U.S. invasion of Iraq) has sent 2.3 million people fleeing their homes (many are going to Chad), killed at least 200,000 — some say as many as 400,000 — and set off a broad conflict in one of the most unstable parts of the world. These are the same casualty numbers that were reported by the official UN News Service seven months ago in September 2006.

A little background on the Sudan: It is the largest country in Africa and has a population of 32 million (approximately that of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas together). Wikipedia says two million were killed in the twenty-year civil war that lasted from 1983 to 2003, which initially pitted black Marxist rebels in the South against the Arab-Islamic political leadership in Khartoum in the North. The militias doing the government's dirty work in Darfur (western Sudan) are Arab nomads.; they have been killing black farmers.

Click here to donate to Oxfam's Sudan Crisis Relief and Rehabilitation Fund.

2) On March 11th, Zimbabwe police arrested and beat opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Reports from the BBC News indicate that Tsvangirai suffered from a fractured skull and received blood transfusions for internal bleeding. After Tsvangirai's release on March 28th, President Robert Mugabe claimed responsibility for Tsvangirai's treatment, adding that Tsvangirai, "asked for it."

A little background on the Zimbabwe: according to TIME, in the 1980s, Zimbabwe was the second largest economy in southern Africa. Millions of tourists visited each year to see hippos, lions and Victoria Falls and the nation gave black Africans the best education and health care on the continent. But over the past two decades, Mugabe has devastated the economy and turned the country into a police state. Unemployment is at 80%, living standards are back to their 1953 levels, and the World Health Organization says life expectancy is the lowest in the world: 34 for women and 37 for men.

In 1999, Tsvangirai founded and organized the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), an opposition party opposed to Mugabe's rule . On September 30, 2000, he vowed to use any means necessary, including violence, to topple Mugabe. He lost a presidential election to Robert Mugabe in March 2002.

TIME's Alex Perry (that's Alex in the photo at right) makes a persuasive case that both of these stories have their roots in the global warming crisis . And there's more where that came from.

3) Finally, a little over three months after Ethiopia's U.S.-backed invasion of Somalia, Mogadishu is engulfed in some of the most savage fighting it has ever seen, according to TIME (Alex Perry, again).

As Ethiopian guns pound insurgent positions in the capital city, more than 300,000 residents have fled "leaving dead bodies in the streets."

"In 16 years of civil war," Perry writes," Somalia had known only a few months of peace and order, which came during the brief rule by the Islamic Courts Union (I.C.U.)" that the Ethiopians overthrew.