Obama expresses concern over Sudan violence

Source: The Washington Post

UNITED NATIONS — President Obama on Thursday voiced “deep concern” over the widening violence in Sudan as his top envoy prepared to travel to the region this month to help resolve a political and military crisis that threatens to upend one of the United States’ principal priorities in Africa: the peaceful division of Sudan into two states.

The White House statement followed Obama’s meeting with his top Sudan envoy, Princeton Lyman. It came as representatives from northern and southern Sudan continued talks Thursday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to try to settle a disagreement over the fate of the disputed region of Abyei, which was attacked by government forces this month in an operation that U.N. officials think might lead to ethnic cleansing.

The Khartoum government and the southern Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement were discussing a deal that would lead to the withdrawal of government troops from Abyei and the deployment of thousands of Ethiopian peacekeepers in the area, according to diplomatic sources familiar with the talks. Meanwhile, fighting has spread in recent weeks to neighboring Blue Nile state and South Kordofan state, where Khartoum’s air force bombarded the area while ground troops and militias sought suspected supporters of the south around the capital of Kadugli.

In recent weeks, senior Obama administration officials have warned Khartoum that its military actions in Abyei, South Kordofan and beyond could undercut the prospects of normalization of U.S. relations with Sudan. On Thursday, the White House said Lyman would press the sides to reach a deal that would lead to a “withdrawal from Abyei and a cessation of hostilities across the region and to support the emergence of two viable states at peace.”

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/obama-expresses-concern-over-sudan-violence/2011/06/16/AGIme1XH_story.html

Really. Along with Chad, Yemen, and the Congo.

White House Says Child Soldiers Are Ok, if They Fight Terrorists



PB

If you'd bothered to do a Google search before posting the most inane bit of anti-Obama drivel you could find, you might have realized that the one and only portion of the Child Soldiers Prevention Act which is therein given exception, section 404 A, concerns licensing for sales of materiel under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Arms Export Control Act, and in no way shape or form constitutes an authorization to use child soldiers.

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HuffPo:
Obama: Child Soldiers Restrictions Easing?>

MotherJones:Obama Aide Backs Child Soldier Policy

:shrug:

PB

Don't worry, I'm sure he would only kill terrorist children.

Any other cliched, fact free comments you'd like to make?

80% of the oil is in the South, give or take a few percentage points.

Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela each beat Sudan, combined N and S, in terms of exports to China. Something like 60% of China's oil imports in 2010 were from the ME, not N. Africa or Central Asia or S. America. Over 7M barrels/day.

Less then 1%.


Do you have anymore fact free comments you would like to make?

And again, they are one of China's major single-country suppliers. So your argument is "They don't have ALL the oil, so they don't have any oil"?

Worldwide it amounts to jack. A mere thimble full.

No Congressional approval needed... we have plenty of money and the Constitution is no longer relevant.

:sarcasm:

If the UN has a <b>responsibility</b> to protect, then it's a real responsibility, and one that the <b>UN</b> has to uphold.

Look at it this way: Parents have a responsibility to their children. Under what circumstances do you let some get consistently beaten up and abused while you use resources to protect just one? Are you willing to sacrifice some of your prosperity and personal well-being, or just say, "Hey, I have a responsibility to engage in some protecting, and I'm helping Howard. Let Lisa and Ben fend for themselves, I got my soccer game to watch"?

If it's a serious responsibility to protect, then you sacrifice to uphold that responsibility. If it's a cover for doing what you want to do, then it's not really a responsibility.

We attack Libya to fend off an "imminent" catastrophe, based largely on what the Libyan opposition said was said, ignoring what Qaddhafi said elsewhere. We can claim to have saved 1000 lives, 10,000 lives, 100,9000 lives, or 1 million lives with equal aplomb because there's no way to know. You pick your unfounded forecast, and you know how many lives you saved. (I personally think that we saved at least 100 million lives, forecasting forward over the next 200 years, as well as several million bunnies.) Meanwhile, we have serious ethnic cleansing and actual, countable deaths in Sudan that go towards unravelling a treaty that the US helped to broker under He Who Must Not Be Named, quite a few casualties in Yemen and, under the direction of a "reformer", Syria, and stand idly by while there are casualties in Bahrain.

Meanwhile, although we can claim that somehow we don't really care about the people in S. Kordofan or Abyei, Sudan's president was invited on a state visit to the People's Republic of China. You know, one of the signatories to the ICC? Hosting somebody indicted by the ICC? A person that China's treaty obligations say they should have arrested and turned over to the ICC? A person that R2P alone would hint shouldn't be hosted without strong words of condemnation and outrage being uttered?

Hell, R2P couldn't even get those "responsible adults" in the room to say a slightly edgy word about China's hosting Bashir.

Clean up your own mess before you go worrying about some one else's.