Communicating Arts - Main Web Site"Cholera breaks out among Pakistan displaced--ICRC," 05 Sep 2008 15:52:15 GMT Source: Reuters By Stephanie Nebehay: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L550045.htm
"Somali guns, inflation worsen Ramadan hunger pangs," 05 Sep 2008 11:54:34 GMT Source: Reuters By Abdi Sheikh: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L5631255.htm
What is it that permits men to overlook, so it seems, the misery brought on in the business of fighting over comparatively abstract legal and spiritual ideation?
How will the next roadside bomb stop the spread of cholera?
how will the next firefight herald peace, the provision of humanitarian aid, and the development of progressive administration and productive agricultural and other basic needs policy?
Has suffering no meaning?
Moreover, need suffering have no meaning even to the suffering?
All those rhetorical questions aside, a common thread across the Islamic Small Wars theaters may be the comparative helplessness of civilians faced with these horrors: it appears they're pushed into extremis and either cannot, want not, or have no idea how to push back.
In relation to Sudan, I posed the question, if as a gun totin' rebel you wanted to surrender, then to whom in that foresaken conflict zone would you do it? As much applies today in Somalia although it has at least a nominal government providing military services to whom a rebel or warlord might well surrender. As such begs the influence of force, however, these war games poison the objects of their affection--i.e., The People.
It would seem Pakistan's war with the primitive or Luddite of the mountains has called back a primitive scourge.
As for Somalia, here's a juxtaposition from the Reuters' piece on that growing monument to irrational and fruitless vanity:
"If their the mortars don't get you, then they will not spare you in the mosques," the 45-year-old Muslim leader says. "Life is useless when sheikhs cannot pray or teach the Koran in mosques."
And, from the writer of the piece, Abdi Sheikh, "Earlier this week, the Islamists said they would intensify attacks on the government over Ramadan in spite of a U.N.-brokered peace deal signed in Djibouti in June."
Diseased? Fight on!
Starving your own? Fight everywhere.
Save arguing over divinity and dominion for the dead, because a handful of the living in both Pakistan and Somalia would seem to be sending the larger portion of the living to their hapless fate at breakneck speed.
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