Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteThis is the question: to whom, specifically whose forces, would you surrender?
In several of the conflicts I monitor (if not refer to in comment or report), including Iraq, the answers have become so clouded or confused to bring into question whether there's a political engine with political objectives practically anywhere in the warfare, or whether violence in small cultures--i.e., brigand and warrior bands--has simply not taken on a life of its own.
The notion becomes most real and painful where many in the west wish to see a packaged and recognizable evil: genocide in Darfur.
As yet a casual reader where Sudan is concerned, I guess I just don't perceive the genocide--i.e., informally, the concerted effort by a people or state to anhilate to the last man, woman, and child the members of another race, religion, or tribe.
To whom would the victims of Darfur's bloody violence surrender?
Make it a better question: to whom would the "warring" parties of various kind surrender?
The Planetary Elders may suggest surrendering to one another, one may only guess.
How sweet.
Neither the government in Khartoum, the U.N., or the United States or anyone else has demonstrated a policing omniscience and power sufficient to stall "rebel" activities. So far, in fact, some rebels seem to have confused the planted outpost flag with an invitation for another round of mayhem.
Darfus is a horror, so much so in the inexorable working of things that it may well be that even to those who have made it so.
If you happen to be a Kalashnikov kind of guy, entertain the questions empathetically:
- Even if you don't want to govern or rule and find even rape and rapine getting a little old, how do you stop? Where do you go to wind it down? If you choose to walk away from, where do you walk away to?
- For the government official and private trade interest--with how many men, what arms, and stationed where for how long can you watch and defend how much de facto frontier?
Perhaps it's possible with night vision and heat detectiving technology to effectively survey the landscape for hostile movement and deploy sufficient force to meet it, but one has yet to see that demonstrated on even the smallest scale.
There's the familiar, daytime guerrilla aspect too: frankly, a man with a pickup truck and a machine gun isn't that much different than one with a good guitar, a decent amplifier, and a gig to go to. By day, hey, everyone understands working on a paycheck; by night, watch out!
Politicians, all, may lack for a true basis of appeal for peace among so many bands of violent men.
Where the motives are not political, the immediately available solutions may not be so either.
In his play, The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams puts in the mouth of a young man, "Tom", whose mother means to make him his sister's keeper while he is hot to get out from under the family roof, "“Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!” [3]
Well, Tom, one need not worry about life in the warehouse out there in Darfur: the lover-hunter-fighter part holds sway across the landscape, and it looks like ain't nothin' on the horizon coming to rescue it from itself.
1. McDoom, Opheera. "Darfur displaced say peace talks doomed to failure." Reuters, October 26, 2007.
2. "Attacks threaten Oxfam's Darfure operation." Reuters, September 24, 2007.
3. "Tennessee Williams." Wikiquote, as experienced October 26, 2007.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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