China sends troops to Darfur, climate change, Paris conference, and is Sudan the top failed state in the world?
A conference is taking place today in Paris on Darfur, without any support from Sudan, but including Sudan-friendly China.
Sudan will watch from a distance on Monday as world powers, including ally China, gather in Paris to seek ways to end the violence in Darfur, in a conference [that] Khartoum rejects as a distraction from current peace efforts.
“We will not comment until the end of the conference,” foreign ministry spokesman Ali Sadek told AFP.
The ministerial gathering, which brings the United States, China and some 15 other nations together, was announced on June 7 at the G8 summit in Germany by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has made Darfur a high priority.
China is sending more than 200 troops to the joint African Union/United Nations peacekeeping force that will be stationed there.
How do you rank a country which has significant economic growth, stability in much of the country, and an utter humanitarian disaster in Darfur? Is is a failed state? Sudanese bloggers Black Kush and Drima dispute the Failed States Index 2007 ranking of Sudan as the #1 failed state in the world. Black Kush writes:
The Index puts Sudan at the top of the list, followed by Iraq and Somalia. Every sane man on the planet knows that there is no government in Somalia for the last ten years. Actually there was no STATE! And how will you describe the carnage raging in Iraq, with a hopelessly impotent American-backed government? It is in a state of civil war, a government that doesn’t have control over its territories, etc.
Drima concurs:
We certainly have a lot of problems and issues to fix, tons of them but check this. With civil war raging, billions of dollars in debt and even sanctions, we still managed to grow our economy by a damn 10%! A failed state certainly can’t achieve that level of economic growth.
A UN report links the Darfur conflict to climate change.
But he [Achim Steiner, the Executive Director of the UN Environment Program] warned the rehabilitation of Sudan’s environment is critical to peace efforts. “Sudan’s tragedy is not just the tragedy of one country in Africa – it is a window to a wider world underlining how issues such as uncontrolled depletion of natural resources like soils and forests allied to impacts like climate change can destabilize communities, even entire nations.â€
The most serious concerns are land degradation, the spread of deserts southwards by an average of 100 kilometres over the past four decades, and the overgrazing of fragile soils by a livestock population that has “exploded†from close to 27 million animals to around 135 million, according to the report.
It also cites mounting evidence of long-term regional climate change in several parts of the country, as witnessed by “a very irregular but marked decline in rainfall†especially in Kordofan and Darfur states.