empty rhetoric

Today’s daily briefing post is on Darfur. First on the list is this post at Have Coffee, Will Write, who notes that the Sudanese government is blaming the Jews for the threat of peackeeping deployment.

An AU official calls for an improvement in the Darfur region:

Chairman of the African Union (AU) Commission Alpha Oumar Konare on Thursday stressed the necessity to improve the security situation in Sudan’s western region of Darfur to create a suitable climate for the repatriation of refugees.

While meeting with representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in al-Fashir, the biggest city in Darfur, Konare said that “the security situation outside refugee camps and villages must be improved because the refugees will certainly return to their homelands.”

“We can not let the residents in Darfur to be the residents of camps forever,” the AU official underlined.

Refugees are one of the biggest issues in Darfur, and although a climate suitable for the return of refugees would be an enormous improvement, I sincerely doubt we will see progress on this front anytime soon.

Word Around the Net writes this post entitled “No Blood for Oil”.

The blossoming relations between the rebels and the government of the Sudan are beginning to show promise:

THE HAGUE, June 22 (Reuters) – Sudan government officials and the Darfur rebel faction which signed a peace agreement last month pledged on Thursday to improve security so reconstruction work can start after three years of conflict.

Sudanese delegates at a meeting in The Hague hosted by the Dutch government agreed to conduct a joint assessment mission to the remote western region to identify short and long-term development needs ahead of a donors’ conference in October.

Despite this real success, the Financial Times writes about how far the region has to go:

For two years AU troops have been stationed in the conflict-ridden region of western Sudan, struggling to stem violence that has killed tens of thousands and forced 2m from their homes.

The mission has evolved from a few hundred soldiers, who were dispatched to monitor an ineffective April 2004 “humanitarian ceasefire”, to some 7,000 troops with a stronger mandate. But violence has continued with impunity, as have doubts over the strength and effectiveness of the AU, a cash-strapped organisation with little experience or capacity for large-scale peacekeeping operations.

Angelina Jolie’s recent comments about Darfur have drawn interesting comments from the blog This is really happening.

The Telegraph has a correspondent named David Blair writing a series of “Darfur Briefings”, the third of which went live today.

Finally, the blog Be-Think asks what World Refugee Day means to the U.S.