A Reporter at Large: Dying in Darfur I asked to be directed to the wells where Amina had collected water. As we drove toward them, with a local guide, we passed a large gray rocket that was partly lodged in the sand; this was the undetonated Sudanese Air Force rocket that Amina had described to me. We also passed an enormous crater, at least twenty-five feet in diameter and five feet deep, where another bomb had exploded. Antonovs are imprecise bombers, and the Sudanese Air Force crew simply heave their munitions out the planes’ trapdoors. “Here are the wells,” our guide said as we pulled up to the red-rock hillock that Amina had depicted on a map she had drawn for me. The killers in Darfur are not always so careful. Neither President Bush nor Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, spoke publicly about the killings in Darfur before March of this year, by which time some thirty thousand people had died as a result of ethnic cleansing. Bush’s evangelical base offered full backing.
Disaster in Darfur by John Ryle Darfur is a 150,000-square-mile expanse of desert and savannah, with five or six million inhabitants, spreading out from the fertile slopes of Jebel Marra, the mountainous zone in Sudan’s far west. Remote from the country’s political heartland on the Nile, it is linked to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, by seven hundred miles of dirt road and a single-track railway. Over the last sixteen months a disas-ter has been unfolding in Darfur, one that is agonizingly familiar to observers of Sudan during the past two decades. In response to an insurgency on the part of rebel groups demanding greater political representation in Khartoum, the government of General Omar al-Bashir has unleashed a scorched-earth policy across large tracts of the province. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the conflict. 120,000 are in camps in Chad. The crisis in Darfur comes at a time when Sudan’s other war, the war in the south, seems to be on the point of resolution.
Facing the Truth with Bill Moyers outh Africans are on a truth-telling mission. As part of the negotiated settlement that led to the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela as president, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established by the South African Government to investigate the crimes committed between 1960 and 1994 during the fight against apartheid. Hailed worldwide as a model for airing gross violations of human rights without resorting to Nuremburg-style trials, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was seen by many in South Africa as a means of healing the wounds of history. "We needed to acknowledge that we had a horrendous past," said the TRC chairman, Desmond Tutu. "We needed to look the beast in the eye, so that the past wouldn't hold us hostage anymore." After more than two years of hearings, the Commission published findings compiled from the testimony of more than 21,000 victims. "Millions of Americans were caught up in the struggle to end apartheid," according to Moyers.
frontline: the triumph of evil It is one of the most shameful stories of the post-Cold War world. One million Tutsis were slaughtered by the Hutu majority in Rwanda while the West turned a blind eye. As the U.N.ís Genocide Conventionócreated to make sure genocide would never happen againómarks its fiftieth anniversary, FRONTLINE examines the role of the U.S. and the U.N. as they ignored the warnings and evidence of impending massacre in Rwanda. FRONTLINE's web site delves deeper into the story, offering: the cables showing how the UN and Western powers ignored warnings and evidence of impending massacre; a chronology of the US and UN actions during the 100 days of slaughter;interviews with US/UN officials and writer Philip Gourevitch; an update on justice in Rwanda today;and readings on genocide and Hutu/Tutsi relations over two centuries.
Anthropology of War in the News War on the Decline Around the World (1/15/06) Yanomamö Ax Fight Interactive: a web page providing elements of The Ax Fight A series of articles on tribal warfare: Probably the single most common motive mentioned by tribal warriors when asked why they go to war, is revenge, according to a Penn State anthropologist. "Clutton-Brock and Parker show how widespread in the animal kingdom is the behavior of returning injury for injury. Beckerman notes that among some primates, injured individuals may punish one of his or her attacker's relatives rather than punish the attacker or, in other primates, the punishment may be meted out not to a relative, but to a friend or ally of the victim. Human revenge is concerned with dominance and status as is that of other primates, and often revenge is taken on a relative or ally. "Revenge is a desire to not just punish the culprit, but to change his mind, to make him see, if only in his death throws, that he was wrong," said Beckerman. The Associated Press
Roberto J. González and David H. Price: When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents by ROBERTO J. GONZÁLEZ And DAVID H. PRICE When anthropologists work overseas, they typically arrive with an array of equipment including notebooks, trowels, tape recorders, and cameras. But in the new context of the Bush Administration’s "war on terror," a growing number of anthropologists are arriving in foreign countries wearing camouflage, body armor, and guns. As General Petraeus and his staff push to enact new strategies in Iraq, the value of culture is taking on a greater role in military and intelligence circles, as new military doctrines increasingly rely on the means, methods and knowledge of anthropology to provide the basis of counterinsurgency practices. The Pentagon is increasingly relying on the deployment of "Human Terrain System" (HTS) teams in Afghanistan and Iraq to gather and disseminate information on cultures living in the theatre of war. Kipp’s comparison of HTS and CORDS begs a series of ethical questions which have gone unanswered. Roberto J.
Anthropologists on the Front Lines The Pentagon’s new program to embed anthropologists with combat brigades raises many concerns A pilot program to embed anthropologists on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan has sparked major controversy in the anthropological community. The program, known as the Human Terrain System (HTS) project, reflects a much larger trend in the national security establishment, with the military increasingly hungry for cultural expertise to fight counterinsurgencies and sustain long, low-intensity conflicts. Anthropologists are struggling to come to grips with the ethics of research on the front lines. The Human Terrain System project is a joint undertaking by the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) and U.S. The “human terrain” is defined as the social, ethnographic, cultural, economic and political characteristics of the people who live in the region occupied by the brigade, a force of 3,000 to 5,000 troops under the command of a colonel. The first HTTs shipped out in the fall of 2006.
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence