PICAYUNE —
Urgent global attention is being paid to Syria’s monstrous president Bashar al-Assad as he commits genocide on his people. But another mass murderer remains mostly out of the American press. Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir continues his decades-long reign of terror on his people despite two warrants for his arrest by the International Criminal Court for, among other vile atrocities, war crimes, crimes against humanity — and yes, genocide.
For years, I have reported on his massacres in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan, a place I’ve never been. But Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times has slipped into the infamous region more than 10 times to keep the world informed of Bashir’s endless killings.
Kristof does this at considerable personal danger, as he also reports from other devastatingly ruthless regimes. On receiving one of his Pulitzer Prizes, he was accurately described as “giving voice to the voiceless.”
Here he is again in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, where the never-satiated Bashir continues his genocide. The international arrest warrants have not impeded him at all. The United Nations has passed resolutions condemning him and takes credit for helping to arrange the independence of South Sudan from arch-predator Bashir. But South Sudan is breaking up internally as Bashir’s troops increase the number of corpses there and in the area.
Kristof begins his Feb. 23 Times column, “Dodging Bombers in Sudan,” among starving families in the Nuba Mountains:
“’We’ve had nothing to eat but leaves from trees,’ one young mother, Samira Zaka, told me. Her malnourished son was gnawing on a piece of wood.”
Suddenly Bashir’s Antonov bomber came hurtling above them. The famished family, reported Kristof, “rushed into caves, and we all cowered deep in the rocks as the plane passed overhead.”
Like other reporters I know, I’ve very rarely been even in quick, passing danger. Once I was covering a vicious street gang in a New York City neighborhood and overheard a voice behind me muttering, “Why don’t we off this guy and see what he has on him?” Somehow this person was overruled and I kept on in sickening fear, leaving the scene very soon after.
But Kristof is often in real peril and somehow even videotapes the scene at times. A Pulitzer Prize isn’t enough for him. He deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom — but from which attentive president?
With his reporting on the increasingly endangered Nuba people, Kristof exposes the impotence of the U.N. and those select African national leaders who are not tyrannous toward their own people, but appear to have given up any further attempts to intervene in rescuing the Sudanese from Bashir’s killers.
As for those warrants for his arrest from the International Criminal Court, I doubt that Bashir even thinks about them, except maybe to smirk.
“I slipped into Sudan and the Nuba Mountains,” Kristof writes, “without a visa, via a rutted dirt track from South Sudan. My vehicle was covered with mud to make it less visible to bombers, which appeared overhead every couple of hours ...
“Tens of thousands of Nuba have been living in caves since June when the government began going house to house, killing families with rebel ties and driving out international aid groups.”
How many of you knew anything about the fragile lives of the Nuba? I didn’t until I read Kristof’s column. While news and opinion sources continue to increase through diverse electronic means, many major American newspapers have ended or greatly decreased their foreign reporting and closed their offices abroad. Yet, like a few other hardy reporters, Kristof keeps providing us with “exclusives” from hazardous nations. Another example from his “Dodging Bombers in Sudan” column:
“That evening, I saw the casualties from the bombing. Four women had been injured, the worst with a shrapnel wound that sliced open her chest and exposed her lungs. Rebels laid her in the back of a pickup for a six-hour drive over rutted roads to an American surgeon, Dr. Tom Catena, who has worked heroically for months to save lives here.
“It seemed unlikely that the woman would survive. As the pickup jolted off, she uttered a piercing scream that continues to reverberate in my mind.”
(In the print edition of this story, Kristof invited readers to see video of his visit to the Nuba Mountains on his blog at: nytimes.com/ontheground.)
Years ago, when American television networks were more inclined to cover government-backed atrocities in unknown, faraway places, Ted Koppel, then the chief reporter for ABC’s “Nightline,” took us — one of the few times, I believe, on American television — to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a cauldron of extreme, unabated government-induced horrors that continues to this day.
But Ted Koppel is no longer with “Nightline,” and the world knows and cares little about the Congo. And if it weren’t for Nicholas Kristof, we’d know hardly anything of Bashir’s gruesome acts against the diminishing survivors in the Nuba Mountains and those other monsters in many places. We have never had access to so much instant global information through ever-expanding technological inventiveness, but we remain ignorant of excruciatingly tormented human beings in nations far away — many of whose leaders are proud, even arrogant members of the U.N.
If only Nicholas Kristof were the chief executive of the U.N. and made it an actual pervasive protector of human rights, wherever piercing screams are commonplace.
Columns
Reporter is lighting up world’s Hells
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Hood’s ‘open carry’ ruling strikes important balances
Attorney General Jim Hood’s office issued an opinion this week that went a long way toward establishing some order and applying some common sense to what has become a contentious and confusing debate both for proponents and opponents of free exercise of the Second Amendment.
House Bill 2, which becomes law July 1, was authored and led to passage by state Rep. Andy Gipson, R-Braxton. Gipson has told the press that he believed the legislation was necessary to clearly define what a concealed weapon is under the law and to distinguish between “concealed carry” and “open carry” rights. But many law enforcement officers charged with enforcing the state’s “concealed carry” law and other contradictory statutes, the bill created some confusion and Hood’s AG opinion brought some clarity to the ongoing debate. -
The Loss of Trust
Amid all the heated cross-currents of debate about the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance program, there is a growing distrust of the Obama administration that makes weighing the costs and benefits of the NSA program itself hard to assess. The belated recognition of this administration’s contempt for the truth, for the American people and for the Constitution of the United States, has been long overdue.
- Vocability Words can be both familiar and extremely confusing when taken from their usual context. Ask any wine enthusiast about legs, fat or bricks and they may assume you are speaking “Vinonese.” Ok — I made that word up; but the language of wine does indeed include legs, fat and brix which have entirely different meanings from what you might assume. Working with definitions from http://www.wineschool.com/vocabulary.html, try your basic knowledge of “Vinonese.”
- Vocability Words can set a tone for a situation, alter someone’s perception of an individual or group — in short, there is power in them. The Bible cautions, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue...” — Proverbs in 18:21, ASB. With that in mind, I will be focusing on words, some recently used and some obscure, to test the readers and build on what you already know. There will be theme weeks, for instance next week will focus on words involving wine — for no particular reason! So try your vocabulary skills with the following and see how you score. I’m always open to suggestions for material.
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A hard rain is gonna fall...
By Kathryn Jean Lopez/Syndicated columnist
After disappearing during his term in office and bringing scandal to his family and state, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford is going to Washington, having won election to Congress. And that’s far from the worst story reflecting the current character of our nation.
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. - More Columns Headlines
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