Darfur's Biggest Safety Problem
Kerry Howley | August 22, 2006, 1:41pm
Imagine a poor African country. Adults are unemployed and children are malnourished. Malaria and tuberculosis are major problems. River blindness afflicts young and old. Crime is everywhere. What do these people need? Ah yes, more helmet laws. Two physicians explain in today's Washington Post:
Now it's time to ignite action on another compelling global problem: deaths from injuries...
Few of the lessons we have learned in industrialized countries have been applied to other parts of the world: requiring cars to be built so that they protect the passenger in a crash; requiring and enforcing the use of seat belts and motorcycle helmets; controlling speeding; and vigorously pursuing drunk drivers.
Hey, here's a wacky idea: Before making blanket policy recommendations to poor countries, consider the fact that said countries are poor. What do people in the developing world drive when they can afford to drive? At least some of them drive our old cars, or some recombination of ancient car parts of dubious origin -- cobbled together monstrosities of engines and metal that somehow manage to run. Where there are new cars, they're often built cheaply and by our standards shoddily. Requiring cars to be up to Western standards might mean safer cars. It might also mean no cars. But I guess that's a good thing, given all the manpower "requiring and enforcing the use of seat belts" is going to take in countries with no manpower to spare.
Brian Doherty slammed Mozambique's WHO-funded "buckle up" campaign back in 2002.
archer | August 22, 2006, 7:57pm | #
KEN BACON: Yes. The sad irony is that, since the peace agreement was signed in May, the violence has increased pretty much throughout Darfur, and it's increased in three fundamental ways.
The first is there is increased fighting among the rebel groups, particularly between the one group that signed it, the Minni Minnawi faction of the Sudan Liberation Army, and the factions that didn't sign. There were two rebel groups that didn't sign, one that did sign. So you have inter-factional fighting.
The second is there's much more banditry taking place. There's a total breakdown of law and order. So cars are being stolen. More cars of NGOs have been stolen in the last two weeks than in the previous two years, for instance.
And, finally, there's much more violence within the camps. The camps have become more politicized. They've become more militarized. They've become more armed and much more violent.
So the poor people who have come into the camps to escape violence are now finding that there is violence in the camps. But most of that violence is being aimed at the African Union peacekeepers and at humanitarian workers. And I think this partly reflects a great deal of dissatisfaction with how things are working out, a lot of frustration...
[The African Union force] really has very limited effectiveness for a couple of reasons. One, it was never set up to be a peacekeeping force. It was set up to be a cease-fire monitoring force, but there's never been a cease-fire that's held.
So the people expected them to protect them, but they didn't come there with a mandate to protect anybody except themselves. And they've barely been able to do that. So the African Union force has been pretty much a disappointment. Everybody says the key to peace is to bring in a much larger, more capable U.N. force. And that's really something that has to happen if we're to end this violence in Darfur...
This is a crisis that has really lived by its own terms. And the real tragedy here is that, while this has been a real disaster for the people of Darfur, it's been somewhat of a humanitarian success, in that the U.N. has moved in and it's feeding almost three million people a day in Darfur, half the population of Darfur.
That's why the people in some of these pictures look so healthy: There's not a food shortage in Darfur.
All of that can be jeopardized now. The U.N. said that, because of the increased violence, it's finding it much harder to reach people. It's reaching less than 80 percent of the people it has to feed now. That's the lowest number, the lowest percentage since 2004. So we're actually sliding backwards, after several years of improving humanitarian coverage, we're beginning to slide backwards. That's a real tragedy.
