Sudan: More of the Same Shame

I think it's important to keep the genocide in Darfur as an issue on this blog. I don't see that many news stories about it anymore, and when I do run across something without specfically looking for it, the only new news is that nothing has changed. So it's tough to keep the story fresh because everytime I touch it, I feel like I'm beating a dead horse. So, in the interest of dead horse blogging, Amnesty International has a report from Darfur. More of the same...

The picture in Darfur is one of distress, denial and disappointment. Distress of people whose lives and livelihood have been destroyed, denial of responsibility by the Sudanese government and disappointment at the slow progress to resolve this crisis, concluded Amnesty International, the first international non-governmental human rights organisation to visit Sudan and meet with senior members of the Sudanese government, since the Darfur crisis began.

...Actually, here's an interesting perspective. How have Bush's human rights violations led to the crisis in Darfur?

"It has made it much harder for the U.S. to take on its self-described role as human rights leader," executive director for Amnesty International U.S. Bill Schulz told IPS.

Schulz, who returned from a visit to Darfur Tuesday as a member of an Amnesty team, said the visit showed that "the U.S. loses an effective voice as a moral force in the world because of a blotched record of its own."

He said that in about a third of all conversations with Sudanese government officials, they had brought up the U.S. human rights record.

The U.S. record had been raised by officials to "justify their own ill-advised practices," Schulz told media representatives earlier. But this showed that "if you commit human rights abuses yourself, you hand fodder to others to justify their deviations."

Sudanese officials had raised issues such as the detentions in Guantanamo Bay and the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Schulz said.