Posts Tagged ‘Sudan’
Egypt and Ethiopia review collaboration on Nile river dam
Meles Zenawi and Essam Sharaf
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
Ethiopia and Egypt have agreed to review the impact of a planned $4.8 billion Nile river dam, which Addis Ababa announced in March, in a bid to open a “new chapter” in once-strained relations.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and his Egyptian counterpart, Essam Sharaf, made the announcement at a joint news conference following talks in Cairo on Saturday. “We have agreed to quickly establish a tripartite team of technical experts to review the impact of the dam that is being built in Ethiopia,” Zenawi said. Experts from Sudan will also be part of the team.
Sharaf said Ethiopia’s planned construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam “could be a source of benefit” – an apparent change in tone by Egypt’s new rulers on what has been a highly contentious issue.
“We can make the issue of the Grand Renaissance Dam something useful,” Sharaf said. “This dam, in conjunction with the other dams, can be a path for development and construction between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt…”
Zenawi’s visit to Cairo was the first by an Ethiopian official since former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted by a popular uprising in February…
The dam is planned for the Blue Nile river in northwestern Ethiopia, a few kilometres from the Ethiopia–Sudan border.
The dam is designed to have an installed capacity of 5250 MW, which is threefold of the 1885.8 MW installed capacity of the 12 currently operational hydro-power plants of the nation.
Bravo. It ain’t easy – it ain’t ever easy to negotiate treaties over natural resources especially water rights. Cripes, we’re still governed by water rights here in New Mexico that go back to Spanish colonial times. Technically, it’s against New Mexico law to collect rainwater after it falls from the skies — unless used by a farmer.
That these nations are willing to discuss and consider collaboration is a step forward.
Khartoum accepts results of secession referendum
Waiting in line to vote
Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, Sudan’s vice president, has said that he accepts the oil-producing south’s split after the first official results showed a 99 per cent vote for independence in a referendum hoping to end a bitter cycle of civil war.
“We announce our agreement and our acceptance of the result of the referendum announced yesterday.
“We wish our brothers in the south good luck and a fruitful future in organising the issues surrounding the new country.” said Taha on Monday.
The comments end speculation that hard-line elements in the Khartoum government would delay recognition of the referendum to garner leverage ahead of talks on how to divide the country’s assets and liabilities.
Taha negotiated the 2005 accord with southern rebel leader John Garang who died three weeks after taking office in the coalition government formed under the deal.
The south is now looking to the international community to recognise its independence, which will likely happen once the final results are confirmed next month…
“The vote for separation was 99.57 per cent,” Chan Reek Madut, the deputy head of the commission organising the vote, told cheering crowds on Sunday in the first official announcement of preliminary results…
Madut said voter turnout in the south was also 99 per cent. He said more than 60 per cent of eligible voters turned out in the country’s north, 58 per cent of whom voted for secession.
Bravo. Decades overdue.
Our military – and others – need a response plan to genocide
In the past 75 years, the world has been witness to genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur and the Holocaust. In a few weeks, the next mass atrocity could happen in East Africa…
In one week, the mostly Christian people of South Sudan will cast a historic vote to secede or not from the Muslim North. While the United States rightly pursues diplomatic solutions to what most believe will be a vote to secede, prudence demands military preparations for violence — to include mass killings that could be carried out simultaneously by varied groups…
Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army could exploit violence in Sudan to cover its own killing of civilians, as could al-Shabaab in Somalia. All could result in mass killings, and all could require military responses.
But so could a withdrawal from Iraq, unrest in Central Asia, or cartel violence in Mexico — and the United States is unprepared to respond to genocide or mass atrocities in any of these cases. Failing to respond to barbaric events of human slaughter is more than just a matter of political will or legal authority — it is a result of the manifest lack of critical thinking about how military forces could respond when prevention fails.
The Obama administration has said many of the right things. The 2010 National Security Strategy proclaims the United States will “in certain instances … use military means to prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities.” The Pentagon’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review says the military will “prepare to defeat adversaries and succeed in a wide range of contingencies,” to include “preventing human suffering due to mass atrocities.” Even so, the United States has done little in the way of concrete planning should mass violence against civilians break out…
RTFA. Follow the links over at the MARO Project.
Understand that humanitarians sometimes need the aid of military leaders. General Zinni is one of those rare birds who understands counter-insurgency as well as battling to halt genocide. Unfortunately, we haven’t had a government that ever seemed to listen to him – one way or the other.
Nearly 4 million southern Sudanese to vote on independence
Almost 4 million southern Sudanese, or roughly half the south’s population, have registered to take part in an independence referendum next week that is likely to split Africa’s largest country in two.
The U.S. State Department said it was optimistic ahead of the vote, which is due to begin in six days and marks the climax of a 2005 peace deal that ended a civil war in Sudan that killed at least 2 million people and destabilized much of the region…
Southerners are expected to vote to separate from the north and form a new nation.
“The total number of people registered in the south, in the eight countries abroad and in the states of northern Sudan is 3,930,916,” said Chan Reek Madut, a member of the referendum’s organizing commission.
The vast majority of voters are in the southern region. Only some sixty thousand registered in the diaspora and less than 120,000 in the north, amid accusations of voter intimidation and a fear of reprisals should the south separate…
The State Department’s Crowley said both the Obama administration’s special envoy for Sudan, Scott Gration, and Princeton Lyman, a veteran U.S. diplomat named to help negotiations between north and south, would be in Sudan for the vote, and said both sides appeared to be sending “the right signals” about the need for an open and credible process.
But he noted that the two sides remain split on key issues including border demarcation, the fate of the disputed region of Abyei, and the sharing of oil revenues — any of which could spark potential confrontation in the weeks following the referendum…
In order to be valid, the referendum requires that 60 percent of those registered turn out to vote.
Cripes. That wouldn’t work in the great democratic nation of the United $tates of America.
And, yes, I trust the government of Sudan about as far as I could throw them uphill into a heavy wind. These are the gangsters who still say they never knew Osama Bin Laden was training in their land back in the mid-80′s.
They didn’t know. The CIA didn’t know. Anyone who travelled through the region knew. But, official liars say they didn’t know. Hogwash!
State Department official = Lobbyist = Money laundering, fraud
A former State Department official who is now a lobbyist has been charged with earning hundreds of thousands of dollars representing the Sudanese government in violation of United States sanctions.
A federal indictment accuses the lobbyist, Robert J. Cabelly, who had worked on Africa issues for the State Department during the 1980s and ’90s, with illegally acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign country, money laundering, passport fraud and making false statements.
Between 2005 and 2007, the indictment says, Mr. Cabelly violated United States sanctions against Sudan by helping it find international investors to develop that country’s largely untapped oil reserves…
According to the indictment, Mr. Cabelly was paid at least $530,000 a year, and had additional unreported funds directly deposited into accounts in the Cook Islands.
Once the Oil Patch Boys get their greedy fingers into a country they are relentless. They have enough of our dollars to pay for any size flunky they wish for – to do their dirty work.
That includes Cabelly, btw – if you thought I was only referring to Bush and Cheney.
First-ever asteroid tracked from space to Earth impact
Students from Khartoum lined up to begin the hunt
For the first time, scientists were able to track an asteroid from space to the ground and recover pieces of it. The bits are unlike anything ever found on Earth.
The asteroid was spotted entering Earth’s atmosphere over Sudan in October and was believed to have fully disintegrated, but an international team found almost 280 pieces of meteorite in a 11-square-mile section of Sudan’s Nubian Desert. The largest was the size of an egg. Lab analysis showed that the rocks belong to a rare class of asteroid that has never been sampled in such a pristine state, so it could fill some gaps in our understanding of the solar system’s early history…
Finding the meteorites was a long shot, but because the rocks would be so important, meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of SETI, lead author of the study, took a bus loaded with 45 students and staff from the University of Khartoum deep into the desert to hunt for them. A 10-hour bus ride and an 18-mile trek through the sand took them to the remote area where scientists thought the rocks, if they existed,
would be. The group began sweeping the desert in a line and two hours later the first meteorite was found by a student.
“It was very, very exciting. Everybody was celebrating,” Jenniskens said. “You have to remember how important it is to find a piece linked to an asteroid we have seen in space.”
These fragments are pristine, virtually as they were through an eternity in space. Little time for any contamination by Earth minerals or oxidizers. Read the whole article.
What a fantastic experience, especially for those students.
Sudan: protest censorship – get arrested! Consistency, anyway.
Police in Sudan have arrested more than 60 journalists during a protest against media censorship, witnesses say. Riot police armed with canes and shields rounded up the journalists outside parliament and took them to a police station.
Demonstrators said they had been protesting against a press crackdown under way despite guarantees of media freedom in a 2005 peace deal.
Murtada el-Ghali, editor in chief of the Ajras al-Hurriya newspaper, told AFP news agency that police had taken mobile phones and money from some of those arrested.
There have been weeks of protests against media censorship in Sudan led by Ajras al-Hurriya and two other papers.
Editors say that newspapers are now subject to nightly checks by the security forces who routinely remove articles they do not approve of.
Do they have a Patriot Act?
I guess they don’t waste time on such sophistry. Old-fashioned fascism.
Pirates reveal a tangled web of illegal weapons trading
Somali pirates holding a Ukrainian ship, the Faina, have threatened to blow up the vessel – which is carrying an undercover cargo of Soviet-made tanks for an African state – unless a multi-million pound ransom is paid.
The pirates in the saga – now in its fourth week – are the equivalent of Fagin’s pickpockets who have made the mistake of stealing a mafia godfather’s top-secret briefcase. Inadvertently, the pirates have done the world’s ordinary citizens a favour. Without their intervention, it would not have been known that Ukraine, with the help of a cast-list of other shady players, is helping to fuel a potentially deadly future conflict in Africa’s largest country, Sudan…
While NATO, the UN, the European Union and innumerable states have now recognised the seriousness of Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden and northwestern Indian Ocean and have created a UN-sanctioned Maritime Security Patrol Area to combat attacks, the Faina’s murky cargo raises even bigger issues.
The ship – which is Belize-registered and has had three previous names – is carrying thousands of tonnes of weapons, including 33 Soviet-made T-72 tanks.
Sudanese rally to support leader
Thousands of people have rallied in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, in support of their President, Omar al-Bashir. The protests followed reports that Mr Bashir is about to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes in Darfur…
Meanwhile, Sudanese government spokesman Mahjoub Fadul Badry said the indictment of Mr Bashir would violate Sudan’s sovereignty.
“If an international organisation or the organisations working in the humanitarian field are behind such an indictment of the head of state, our symbol of national sovereignty, then no-one should expect us to turn our left cheek,” Mr Badry told al-Arabiya television.
The UN estimates that some 300,000 people have died because of the conflict but Sudan’s government says the scale of the violence has been exaggerated.
Can you imagine living in a nation so politically backward that overwhelming world opinion considers their president a criminal who should be brought to justice – and the citizens react by turning out in hordes to support him in the name of patriotism.
Oh!
