Nope, No Genocide Here

What was that again about American "overreaction" to the Darfur crisis?

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 15 - The United Nations health agency said Friday that the death toll in refugee camps in the Darfur region of Sudan had reached 70,000, and that people would continue dying at the rate of 10,000 a month as long as the international community did not provide more money.

David Nabarro, director of the crisis action group of the Geneva-based World Health Organization, said despite the international attention Darfur had attracted, the United Nations was not receiving the money it needed to curb deaths caused by malnutrition and disease.

"Every day in newspapers in the U.S., Europe and Japan, there is coverage of the suffering in Darfur, yet we don't have a significant enough popular perception around the world of the enormity of that suffering, and the United Nations cannot get the funding for this priority program," Mr. Nabarro said in a telephone interview.

The United Nations has received only half of the $300 million it needs, he said, while with full financing it could reduce the current mortality rate by half.

But I thought all those kind-hearted aid workers were saying not so long ago that there was no crisis in Darfur, and that things there were no worse than anywhere else in Africa? And that was after the death toll had climbed to an estimated 50,000, meaning perhaps 20,000 people have died in the space of a month - if that doesn't constitute a crisis, why does Iraq constitute a world-scale fiasco? Not even the most strident anti-American propagandists can claim that Allied forces are killing Iraqis at anywhere near such a rate.

Comments

[Brian]

Yeah, but invading Iraq was George Bush's idea so it mut be the worst thing in the world.