World Watches While We Die, Say Liberians

[DoYouEverWonder]

http://allafrica.com/stories/200307300699.html

July 30, 2003

"All of the patients in JFK hospital in Monrovia will die this week - they have no food, no water and no medicine," says Wilson Tarpeh, a Liberian businessman and newspaper publisher. Tarpeh, who is in Minneapolis, has been in telephone contact with physicians at the medical facility and with other residents of the capital.

"We are pleading with the international community to hurry up, hurry up, but nobody is doing anything," he says. "It seems they are just going to let our people die." Tarpeh estimates that at least 10 percent of Monrovias residents are at immediate risk from lack of food and water and from disease. Aid workers believe 300 to 400 people are dying daily from cholera.

<snip>

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has appealed to the Security Council to approve deployment of a multinational force to Liberia with a Chapter VII mandate, which permits the use of force. "The consequences of allowing the situation to spiral out of control are too terrible to contemplate," he said in a strongly worded letter on Monday.

<snip>

At a White House press conference Wednesday, President George Bush said that he stands by the offer of aid for Liberia that he made six weeks ago before leaving on a five-nation Africa trip, but he reiterated the conditions he has said must be met. "Charles Taylor must go, the cease-fire must be in place, and we will be there to help ECOWAS," he said. "We're working to get those conditions in place, and we will continue working to get them in place until they are in place, at which point we will then take the necessary steps to get ECOWAS in place, so that we can deliver aid and help to suffering Liberians."

As usual, W offers too little, too late. But of course his month long vacation and fund raising is much more important than Liberia?

[boilerbabe]

1. Just read yesterday that Taylor is equivocating on stepping down!

It is horrible what's going on there, and also confusing for the general public. If Iraq was such a priority, why not Liberia?? Bush completely sucks and I read he plans to cut brush on his ranch in Crawford during the entire month of August. While people are being killed left and right!! What an asshole!!

[DoYouEverWonder]

2. Judging from the lack of responses

to threads about Liberia as opposed to some of the other nonsense that people post, it's not surprising that W knows he can get away with murder. Most Americans won't even notice.

[Robb]

4. We were discussing this at work last night

...How little "we" (Murkans) know about geography and global political situations until we bomb someplace, or someone kills a bunch of us somewhere.

Hell, I consider myself pretty freakin' globally aware (I went to a United World College, then Berkeley, for crying out loud), and all I could give you a few months ago about Liberia was that it was in Africa.

Blame the xenophobic lack of global education in this country. Even, to paraphrase Berke Breathed, the narrow, suffocating zealotry masquerading as parenting.

[bicentennial_baby]

5. Could be

because a great deal of DUers have stated that they don't support an intervention, due to ulterior motives on *'s part. Very similar to the reaction of the Left in the 70's during the Cambodian genocide, in that people did'nt trust the administration after Vietnam, and refused to believe what they said was happening in Cambodia.

I am torn on this...I believe that intervention is neccessary, but I fear the results, both long term and short term. It seems that no one will send troops before September anyway, so it will be too late for these suffering people. It makes me angry, and sad.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

6. But W's wife used to BE a liberian....

said Emily Latella.

[Enraged_Ape]

3. Shrub thinks Liberians...

are those snooty ladies that work in the place where they keep all them books.

[realFedUp]

7. Just some thoughts

Giving Taylor an ultimatum isn't in the way of giving humanitarian aid...Bush and the UN should be figuring out how to do that to relieve people living there. I don't know what the hell ECOWAS is doing.

Unless you are going to airlift citizens to the ships offshore
for medical aid and food, it's just a political band-aid to have them there.

The people who say that we went into Iraq to free the Iraqi citizens
from tyranny aren't really including other countries in that sentiment.

There are other countries in Africa that aren't fairing as well either...what is this administration's policy on humanitarian aid only, without a military presence?

[rook1]

8. I wonder...

....why so many of the people who were screaming "no war in Iraq" now screaming "help the Liberians" isn't Liberia a sovereign nation as well?
Wouldn't US troops on the ground in Liberia be the same thing?

....or is there another reason Liberia is different?

[NewYorkerfromMass]

10. Yeah, they and the rest of the world are ASKING us to help

it is totally 180 degrees different there.

[Tansy_Gold]

11. No war ON Iraq because there was no war IN Iraq

Again, I'm not an expert, just a person who does give this stuff some thought and keeps an open mind to the ideas of others.

As to why there was a global outcry against an attack against Iraq and the beginnings of a global outcray in favor of intervention in Liberia, I think it comes down to this: Whatever kind of monster Saddam Hussein is/was, his regime was reasonably stable. The invasion by the US/UK was bound to destabilize not only Iraq but potentially other countries in the region: Iran and Syria most notably. With the instability already in Israel, anything more was seen as potential disaster, and I think that fear has been borne out.

Liberia, mired in a long-standing civil war, has been unstable for some time. The risks to American lives (which, as we all know, are far more valuable than any others, sarcasm off now), a la Somalia, are perceived as greater than what the might U.S. military faced going into Iraq. How much preparation has been done regarding any possible intervention in Liberia, I don't know; we know there was plenty of preparation before the invasion of Iraq.

The issues of resources, of course, are also of importance, but less so, I think, if put against a big picture of the potential for resource exploitation in Africa that the neo-cons might have in mind. I personally believe they have a very long-term plan, part of which includes allowing various plagues -- HIV/AIDS is the perfect example -- to take a major toll on the entire African continent, after which massive conquest will be a cakewalk. Thus the invasion of Iraq was predicated on an available and accessible and essentially developed source of crude oil which will fuel the engines of the neo-aristos long enough for them to engineer their take-over of Africa in another, oh, thirty years or so, just about the time the mideast oil starts to run out.

Underlying all this geopolitical/economic stuff remains the fundamental racism of the American psyche. Africans simply do not count as much as Iraqis, who are much lighter skinned, who often speak excellent English, and who are in many respects more "equal" to Euro-Americans than any African. We have never dealt with racism in this country -- alleviating the worst of segregation is not the same as addressing racism, in a country that stopped lynching but now just incarcerates adult African-American males -- and there is no way, therefore, to deal with it in international relations. We have only to look at Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, famine, flood, war, you name it, and Africa never counts as much as any place populated by lighter-skinned folks.

Any other explanations, IMHO, are bullshit.

Tansy Gold

[morstyranni]

9. Oh, so it's the world's fault, I thought it was this guy's

[dfong63]

12. US should not be the world's cop

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has appealed to the Security Council to approve deployment of a multinational force

so why is this America's problem, or Bush's decision? leave it to the UN.

[wuushew]

13. For a minute I thought it said Libertarians not Liberians!

Might be the same argument however

[BiggJawn]

14. They should be careful what they hope for.

If I was in another country, I sure as hell wouldn't have the United "Bomb your country to powder then install a weak puppet while we rape your national resources" States as my first choice for a Savior...

They want UN help, let that debating society work it out.

We were only trying to "help" the Vietnamese people, as I recall.....