Hey Todd - I usually love your reviews, but I have to disagree on this one. I agree with the other poster - way too glib. The fact that there wasn't a lot of blood and gore and hacked up human bits was intentional - that was what the director/writer Terry George wanted. It is supposed to be a personal story that is the lens through which we become aware of the horrors of the Rwandan Genocide. I think this movie showed the "human impact" of the genocide better that a blood n' gore flick would have. The story of Hotel Rwanda was so moving, for me, b/c it was real (albeit "Hollywooded up"), and it focused on how individuals dealt with the situation, as well as their personal losses. I loved Don Cheadle - he was very "non-Don" for me, also loved Nick Nolte.
Anyway, everyone is entitled to their opinion but I just had to weigh in with mine b/c I feel so strongly that this was a great movie. As for moving, when I saw it everyone left the theatre like zombies b/c we were all too upset to even speak. I think this was a very important movie for everyone to see now, rather than waiting for it to come out on video.
It's a relief to read an intelligent criticism that doesn't come off as patronizing or as "you don't know, you weren't there, so shut up." Plus you made reference to my post, always good for the ego.
Granted, 99.99% of The United States of American media(sorry had to put the full name there, don't want to be non-PC) is just a stuffed suit spouting info-tainment. That's why you have to dig to get the real scoop, sometimes BBC and CBC just ain't enough. And no I'm not going to Rwanda. America does deserve to be taken down a notch (more like 3 or 4), but I love this country; for better or worse, richer or poorer, 'til death do us part. This is my home.
Any more links out there about this story? Please post. Spare us the "preacher in the pulpit" bit and I promise I'll never mention that whole love my country crap ever again. I think a rash has just developed typing "I love this country."
National Inquirer
nada(maybe not enough celebrity aliens with eating disorders and botched botox foreheads in the country)
Caring enough to find about things and people beyond your scope of vision?
priceless.
The BBC is not "digging deep" for news stories. I posted the CBC and BBC links as they were the top ones that came up when I typed in Romeo Dallaire.
Calling me patronizing doesn't remove the gravity of people curlinginto their excuses of "I didn't know". Not in 1938-45. And defintiely not today.
Sorry, tOdd, but you outed yourself as someone who couldn't care less when you you said you had no idea how bad it was or even where Rwanda is located. Perhaps if you had opened a newspaper in the last 8 years, you would have heard about what was going on, what the United States (of America) did to prevent peacekeeping efforts (but hey, let's salute those soldiers in Iraq doing a bang-up job bringin freedom - afterall, they're American and they kick ass, right?)... oops, sorry, that's for another time). THEN you might have had a differnt take on the film.
I said I was ignorant as to what caused it or where Rwanda is on a map (i doubt you could find it). I said it knew it was a really bad sad scene.
I don't think there's anything wrong with me being honest about not knowing what caused it. And doubly not wrong to state my disappointment that this movie did not bring to full light the scope of the horror there.
Also I don't take any high road people seriously unless they actually did something besides read articles while sitting around...
This message has been edited by oddtodd7 on Feb 12, 2005 11:05 AM This message has been edited by oddtodd7 on Feb 12, 2005 11:01 AM
I know exactly where Rwanda is on a map, so that was a childish comeback. I said previously that I do not have to qualify my comments or criticisms with a listing of all the things I have or have not done to combat human rights abuses, social injustice etc. You have no clue what I've worked on. And I'm not inclined to share - it doesn't make my comments any more or less relevant. I'm not suggesting one had to do something like go there to make a difference. But for God's sake, at least know about it to talk about it. It wasn't just a movie review you wrote, it was the shrug you gave to not knowing a big ole: I dunno much about Rwanda. I sorta heard it was bad and all - haven't a clue where it is, never met anyone from Rwanda, haven't tried to find out very much, but anyway the movie sucked 'cause I didn't cry.
I'm sorry - actually, I'm not - if taking you to task for that pisses you off, but your review and your admitted glibness was shocking - and not the sort of thing I (in all my self-importance) felt could go unchallenged. Anyway, I'm tired of saying the same thing over and over again (as I am sure you and others are if they are reading it). The defensiveness of the responses, I suspect, reflect less that I didn't pick pretty words and perhaps more that maybe I made some points that hit home.
Oh, and I do not sit around on the sofa all day. That would be you. And that's fine. Just pick up a newspaper and find out what's going on in the world. Either way, we are all responsible for what happenes - and worse, what doesn't happen - so best to be informed and speak intelligently.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions. This is HIS wesite. While Rwanda was/is and will always be a stain of poverty on the human consciousness, we are talking about a MOVIE. This is an INTERPRETATION of an actual event. If TOdd felt it didn't "involve" him, then it didn't involve him. If this was a documentary, and TOdd said, well I don't think there was enough children with their arms cut off, then you might have a beef. But if the movie didn't make TOdd cry, then that is what it didn't do. I mean if you think about it, all TOdd did was sit in a dark room and watch flickering shadows and electronic noises for two hours and then write about the flickering shadows and electronic noises. Folks, movies aren't real life- they are shadows.
As am I ... entitled to my opinion. Indeed, it IS his websites, and has opened it up to discussion, feeback, chyatt, etc. which does not always mean a pat on the back (which I have done in the past, too - not that it makes any difference.) Again, and for the very last time, my beef is that anyone with the ability to read, with an education, with access to information should make it their repsonsibility to know what the hell is going on in the world. Ignorance is not an excuse, it is, to be blunt, a scandal. Especially when it's been splattered (morbid pun intended) everywhere for a decade. How could someone not know how it happened? It happened because more people sat by and let it happen than those who did not. I ask the same of those who lived in towns near Auschwitz and who could smell burning flash day and see plumes of ashes in the sky after day for years and claimed they knew nothing. They didn't care.
It was there for all to hear and read about. Of course movies are movies which is exactly my point. They couldn't possibly be "good" enough to address such a horror, but it is far worse to be utterly unaware of the horror, where it happened and then dig ones feet into the ground and say "and that's just a-okay, and it's the movie's fault that I'm still ignorant."
Yeah whatever, but you don't have to be such a DICK about it!
I will be happy to argue the merits of being aware of world situations. WHY the fuck though aren't you up in arms about the unfair trade practices that have lead to children being sold into slavery in West Africa to harvest chocolate for your Snicker's bars , or the fact that the Chinese are trading oil for weapons with warlords in the Sudan (money that is coming form the massive amount of Chinese products that you are buying from Walmart and Target)- which is a genocide that is happening right this MINUTE- as opposed to a terrible-awful situation that happened close to 10 years ago in Rwanda?
Todd's postion is like most American's, unaware of what their dollar's are doing to the rest of the world. He didn't think the movie brought home the point- it may be a shitty movie- I don't know because I haven't seen it. I probably WON'T go see it, not because I don't care about what happened, but becuase I don't want to line some Hollywood producers pocket with blood money. You can argue art vs profit, but there isn't a movie that is greenlit that isn't meant to make a profit. If Cheadle wins an Oscar, how much of that money made from the extra revenue is going to go to the survivors of the genocide? ANSWER: NOT ONE PENNY.
So follow the cash anon worry about something you can change...
Good gawd. This isn't about picking and choosing which horrible event one should address, so, ya, I didn't go on abot ALL the other things that are going on today. That said, because something happened ONLY 10 years ago, does not mean it's over. Rwandans are still desperately tryingto recover - as many Jews - and others - who perished at the hand sof the Nazis and world indifference or survived the Shoah. Romeo Dallaire survived several breakdowns because he felt he could not do enough even though he did more than nations. It is heartbreaking that all his efforts still seem for not where when people don't care enough to even Google a map to know where the country is located. To go beyond asking why it happened and look for ways to ensure such things don't happen again, as the truth is they happens because people don't care enough to stop them and that means all of us.
So, I'm not going to AGAIN repeat what I wrote earlier, and earlier and before that. I'm well aware of what's going on elesewhere, but thanks for the heads up. And please, tOdd appears more than capable of speaking for himself, not sure you need to speak FOR him.
Incidentally tOdd, instead of wasting precious energy on great illluminaries such as Howard Stern, maybe step out once in a while to learn what real thinkers are saying about the really important things (and I am not suggesting there is no room for humor, in fact, quite the opposite, which is why I visit your site and enjoy your cartoons and even other moive reviews - even if I don't always agree. They have an important place, too - as condescending as you porbably take that).
In fact, just the other night at The New School, Romeo Dallaire and Samantha Powers spoke about Rwanda to an overflowing audience. There was not enough room to contain everybody, that people had to go to otehr rooms and watch video feeds. Right here in New York City. Just for you.
Finally, (for real this time) there is a line I once read in the introduction of boook on War Crimes (so you see, I'm not sitting arounf googling article, but whatever) by Nobel Prize laureate Eli Weisel: If they have the courage to write it, we must have the courage to read it.
This Shoah survivor demands that the very least we can do is inform ourselves. To not do so shows remarkable indffierence and a lack of concern about humanity.
I will leave with another quote from the great Hillel:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now—when?
As anyone knows, I love a good argument as anyone. You seem like a worthy person ANON- I appreciate what you are saying- but what you are saying makes me get back to something that bothers me about our entire society.
We are so good at being aware of stuff (everything from Rwanda to who Britney is boffing this week), but awareness without action is still nothing.
Every day we have our lives that we lead (pay bills, love and cry) yet when a movie like Hotel Rwanda comes around it's like, just by "knowing" about the atrocities, we have "done" something. In my opinion, it becomes the worst sort of voyueristic pornography imaginable. It's snatching coins from the eyes of the dead
I have always wondered why Hollywood waits so long to come out with these "important" movies. "The Killing Feilds" came out 10 years after the fact as well. It's like they are so worried that it will upset the apple cart, like you don't want to rattle the cage of the movie going public- you don't want then to really get worried enough to DO anything.
It's a proven fact that the mdeia and the government want us to be afraid all the time- but not so afraid that the fear turns into anger, then action. They want us in a feeling of gnawing helplessness.
I am not defending TOdd- This isn't a website devoted to solving the worlds problems- it's supposed to be a humorous place. Like any joke, it has the potential to backfire- If you didn't think it wasn't funny, then that is cool. But if you want to go after him for being ignorant- that isn't cool...
I'm not ignorant! Saying I can't find it on a map or not knowing what caused the killing isn't the same of being completely oblivious to the situation. I was honest.
And excuse me professor...
Do you know about the death squads in the Congo?
How bout the ongoing slaughter in the Darfur?
I'm sure you know everything about those situations too? Completely up to date to the causes of these problems? Because you're so educated?
Or perhaps you'll read up on them after a movie comes out or after the slaughter gets into the hundreds of thousands. At that point will it qualify as important to you?
And then you can soothe your hypocritical bleeding heart and help the situation by reading all about it on the internet.
Me thinks the sofa surfer doth protest too much. You're wrong. Just so wrong. But whatever. I needn't qualify myself. Trying to deflect my valid criticisms of a less than tremendous display of insight in your review (and subsequent postings) about something so profound with challenges about what I know or don't know and what I do about the things I do know about is irrelevant. You're behaving like a child (which is very different and far less charming than being childlike) having a temper tantrum and saying things like, "Oh ya?! Well, I bet you don't know about this! Or, That!" What's next, you gonna tell me my momma dresses me funny? C'mon.
It's only that I resent being criticized for being 'ignorant' when it's such a relative term. And I don't appreciate feeling like my humanity is being questioned.
And your 'childish' comment is simply backpeddling out of an argument that you know most likely you were in no position to start because of your glass house.
Geez I'm away for a couple days and I come back to find the battles already been fought!
kay, I should probably let things go, and most points have been made already, but to defend the other thread
First of all, Anonymous, I don't stand for the United States of America - I stand for Canada, and yes that means all Canadians. All 32 million. I consulted them all. You dipshit. Thanks for missing the point.
You're making the point of how things should be - that people shouldn't be ignorant. No kidding. A lot of awful shit could be avoided if we were all more informed, tolerant, etc. My point was that they (we) are ignorant. So then a good approach is to offer information, meet people where they're at, rather than rip them. You figured out that I'm ignorant in all world issues from my response to a movie review? That's pretty impressive.
Also, I didn't ask you to qualify your good deeds. Why would I believe you anyway? Why would you believe me? My name is Johnny Scratchnuts.
and Oh yeah -I've never even met Todd! We totally don't hang out or go for beers even. So we're not teaming up to defeat you.
I agree with some of what you say -pick up a paper, get informed -but your preaching to the congregation here. Again, what you read was a movie review.
I will say that this is the fastest growing thread on this side of the bored. Normally it takes about 1 year for posts to grow about 20 on this side...normally about 10 minutes on the tv bored.
May 18, 2005
The Mournful Math of Darfur: The Dead Don't Add Up
By MARC LACEY
KHARTOUM, Sudan - Darfur's dead have been tossed into the bottoms of wells, dumped into mass graves, interred in sandy cemeteries and crudely cremated. Children have been snatched from the arms of their mothers and thrown into fires, villagers dragged on the ground behind horses and camels by ropes strung around their necks.
All of which makes the important and politically charged task of counting the precise number of victims of the two-plus years of war in western Sudan a virtually impossible exercise.
Is the death toll between 60,000 and 160,000, as Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick told reporters during a recent trip to the region?
Or is it closer to the roughly 400,000 dead reported recently by the Coalition for International Justice, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization that was hired by the United States Agency for International Development to try to determine whether the killing amounts to genocide. (Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called the Darfur killing genocide last year, but Mr. Zoellick has studiously avoided the issue.) The State Department has said the higher mortality figures offered by some groups are "skewed" by overestimates of the number of deaths from violence in Darfur, rather than from disease and other causes.
Those trying to tally the terror are engaging in guesswork for a cause. They say they are trying to count the deaths to shock the world into stopping the number from rising higher than it already is. Sudan has not issued an estimate of its own, although officials in Khartoum label the numbers floating around as propaganda.
With death certificates nonexistent, census figures hopelessly out of date and much of Darfur's population uprooted from its home villages and scattered into makeshift settlements and camps, the only feasible way to count is through broad-brush statistical analysis.
To the survivors, the various estimates are impossible to grasp. In the middle of the mayhem, they often had no idea how many people were slain in their own tiny villages when the government-backed militias, known as the janjaweed, swept in full of so much fury.
"So many died," Ibrahim Adam Abdallah said simply, his face blank, when asked how many lives were lost in Seraf, a settlement in South Darfur that was first emptied a year ago and set on fire in April, to ensure that no one ever goes home.
John Hogan, the John D. MacArthur professor of sociology and law at Northwestern University who led the compilation of the numbers for the Coalition for International Justice, argues that devising a death toll for Darfur is worth the effort, even if it is a rough approximation. "To focus the attention of people, it's important to give them some sense of the scale of what's happening in Darfur," he said.
Error is inevitable, Mr. Hogan acknowledged. "Obviously, this is not correct to the person, or even the 10 or the 100," he said. "But it's much better to have information of some kind - and this is a good estimate - than no information."
Whatever the actual figure, it is undoubtedly a moving target. People are still dying from sickness, starvation and exposure at rates that experts say are higher than the already elevated rates at which they died before the conflict began in early 2003. And although Darfur has long been known for its lawlessness, violent deaths are regarded as far higher than normal, as well.
Totaling up the dead in Africa's wars has always been particularly challenging, from the mass killing in Rwanda (in which somewhere around 800,000 people died) to the continuing war in Congo (where the toll is now estimated to be in the neighborhood of 3.8 million).
The continued insecurity in Darfur and the rugged nature of the vast battlefield make counting its dead a particularly error-prone exercise.
The World Health Organization looked into the health consequences last year when it estimated that 70,000 people had died over a seven-month period from malnutrition and disease linked to the conflict.
Researchers for the Coalition for International Justice then released their more comprehensive review. They were not able to get into Sudan, but under an American government contract they managed to conduct 1,136 interviews with refugees in eastern Chad, asking them whether they had family members who had died in violent circumstances or were missing.
From this survey, the coalition's researchers established a death rate of 1.2 per 10,000, which is alarmingly high. Applying that figure to the estimated number of displaced people in Chad, the coalition concluded that 142,944 people may have been killed by government forces or allied militias, the main groups ravaging the civilian population.
The figure is rough. It assumes that every missing relative has died, which will surely not prove true. It assumes that the death rate among relatives of the refugees in Chad is similar to the rate among those who remained in Darfur, which may or may not be accurate.
The Coalition for International Justice then took the W.H.O. study and - assuming that same number of people died in the beginning of the conflict from sickness as two years later - projected the death estimates for the entire Darfur war. The total number of health-related deaths came to 253,619, for a grand total of 396,563 deaths.
In its attempt to determine whether the killing amounted to genocide, the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur conducted extensive interviews in all three Darfur states and studied numerous raids in minute detail. In some cases, the commission reported the number of militiamen who swept into a village, the number of government bombers flying overhead and the number of corpses left behind.
Despite such precision, the commission made no attempt to come up with a Darfur-wide death toll. In fact, commissioners found that totaling up the number of damaged villages in Darfur was difficult enough. Estimates range from 700 to well over 2,000.
Still, the counting continues, and eventually, when Darfur's violence mercifully ends, a number will be agreed upon. That number, like the figure of 800,000 for the Rwanda massacre, will be forever appended to the awful events. The rest of the world, slow to react to Darfur, will then have plenty of opportunity to think about it, and wonder why it was able to grow as large as it did.
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Still feel the need to be moved by the misery, plot and ending? Then check it out.
May 18, 2005
MOVIE REVIEW | 'SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL: THE JOURNEY OF ROMÉO DALLAIRE'
Ten Years Later, Back at the Killing Fields to Heal the Spirit
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
t. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the tiny United Nations peacekeeping force stationed in Rwanda in 1994, remembers meeting twice with Hutu extremists who belonged to the bloodthirsty Interahamwe militias. These killers, who carried out the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days, had cold hands, he recalls in Peter Raymont's unsettling documentary "Shake Hands With the Devil." When you looked them in the eye, he remembers, there was no sign of humanity, only "the most evil I could ever imagine."
The film, which opens today in New York, is a respectful portrait of General Dallaire, now retired, who comes across as a thoughtful, resolute but profoundly shaken man, more philosopher than warrior. In 1992 he was dispatched to Rwanda with a 60-member peacekeeping force. A treaty between the Hutus and Tutsis had just been signed, and his first impressions of the African country were rosy: he imagined he had gone to "paradise on earth."
But heaven quickly turned into hell. Civil war erupted the following year after Rwanda's moderate Hutu president died in a plane crash. The peace treaty, he realized, was a bluff, and Hutu extremists had already planned their deadly uprising. General Dallaire repeatedly and frantically alerted United Nations officials in New York to the coming bloodbath.
Even after they refused to send more troops or allow him to confiscate Hutu weapons, he remained in the country during the reign of terror and tried to save as many lives as possible.
If Terry George's wrenching film "Hotel Rwanda" and Raoul Peck's HBO movie "Sometimes in April" have already put a tragic human face on a catastrophe that the American mass media barely acknowledged while it was happening, "Shake Hands With the Devil" ratifies their horrifying visions. General Dallaire's descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of human butchery, as well as the movie's images of piles of dead bodies, severed limbs and rooms of skulls, are grimmer than anything seen in those films.
"Shake Hands With the Devil" is the second Canadian documentary to make General Dallaire its subject. It follows Steven Silver's equally admiring portrait, "The Last Just Man," shown two years ago in the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.
The new film, in following the general's anxious return to Rwanda with his wife, Elizabeth, on the 10th anniversary of the massacres, fleshes out that portrait. The trip is presented as the necessary final step in his recovery from post-traumatic stress, which left him depressed and suicidal after his return to Canada in a state of nervous exhaustion.
As he continues on a trip that he worried would be a journey into hell, he gains in strength and spirit the more he discovers that order and sanity have replaced chaos and madness. Most of the Rwandans recognize him as a hero and a humanitarian. He participates in the commemorative ceremonies of the bloodbath and delivers a quiet but devastating speech.
He and the film's other talking heads, most notably Stephen Lewis, a Canadian who now serves as the United Nations Special Envoy for H.I.V./AIDS in Africa, mince no words in excoriating the reluctance of the United Nations and the powers that could have stepped in and halted the slaughter and didn't. If there is plenty of blame to spread around, the Belgians, who colonized the area and created the ethnic distinction between Hutus and Tutsis based on dubious anthropology, receive the sharpest criticism.
Many reasons are given for the West's indifference. Since there was nothing anybody wanted from Rwanda, it was convenient to dismiss the civil war as African tribal feuding. Racism, of course, was a deep, underlying factor. Wasn't the war in the former Yugoslavia also rooted in longstanding tribal animosities?
Beyond apportioning blame, "Shake Hands With the Devil" acknowledges that the capacity for evil is a human component. Under certain conditions, entire populations can lose their humanity and go berserk. With madness all around him, General Dallaire maintained his humanity and (just barely) his sanity.
Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
Opens today in Manhattan.
Directed by Peter Raymont; written by Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, based on his book, written with Maj. Brent Beardsley; director of photography, John Westheuser; edited by Michèle Hozer; music by Mark Korven; produced by Mr. Raymont and Lindalee Tracey; released by California Newsreel. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue, South Village. Running time: 91 minutes. This film is not rated.
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Thank you for enlightening me. I don't know what I was thinking. You know, with the working all day and trying to be a productive citizen. What a fool I have been. I come home and log on to this site to get a little downtime from the world's problems. What an idiot, I've been.
I'm marching to the Capital with a can of jet fuel and some matches. I'm going out monk-style. Care to join me? You can go first, I'll even light your match, you holier-than-thou, attention craving, sack of hooey. That's right, I said hooey, bitch!
"Go sell some medicine, bitches"- Dave Chappelle on the UN
So that was YOU! She's been taking all kinds on antibiotics to deal with the damage. which may also explain how you came to your intellectual deficiencies. My apologies, I didn't realize how you came to your intellectual disability.
May 31, 2005
Day 141 of Bush's Silence
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Nyala, Sudan
A reader from Eugene, Ore., wrote in with a complaint about my harping on the third world:
"Why should the U.S. care for the rest of the world?" he asked. "The U.S. should take care of its own. ... It's way past time for liberal twits to stop pushing the U.S. into nonsense or try to make every wrong in the world our responsibility."
And while that reader wasn't George W. Bush, it could have been. Today marks Day 141 of Mr. Bush's silence on the genocide, for he hasn't let the word Darfur slip past his lips publicly since Jan. 10 (even that was a passing reference with no condemnation).
There are several points I could make to argue that it's in our own interest to help Darfur. Turmoil in Darfur is already destabilizing all of Sudan and neighboring Chad as well, both oil-exporting countries. And failed states nurture terrorists like Osama and diseases like polio, while exporting refugees and hijackers.
But there's an even better argument: Magboula, a woman I met at the Kalma Camp here.
She lived with her husband and five children in the countryside, but then as the Arab janjaweed began to slaughter black African tribes like her own, she and her family fled to the safety of a larger town. In December, the Sudanese Army attacked that town, and they ran off to the bush. Two months ago, the janjaweed militia caught up with them.
First the raiders shot her husband dead, she said, her voice choking, and then they whipped her, taunted her with racial insults against black people and mocked her by asking why her husband was not there to help her. Then eight of them gang-raped her.
They may also have mutilated her. At one point she spoke of being slashed with a knife in the shoulder and chest, but when I asked her about it, she kept changing the subject.
"I was very, very ashamed, and very frightened," she said, leaving it at that.
After the attack, Magboula was determined to save her children. So they traipsed together on a journey across the desert to the Kalma Camp, where a small number of foreign aid workers are struggling heroically to assist 110,000 victims of the upheaval. Magboula carried her 6-month-old baby, Abdul Hani, in her arms, and the others, ranging from 2 to 9, stumbled beside her.
Magboula finally arrived at Kalma a few weeks ago. But the Sudanese government is blocking new arrivals like her from getting registered, which means they can't get food and tents. So Magboula is getting no rations and is living with her children under a straw mat on a few sticks.
Then a few days ago, Abdul Hani, Magboula's baby, died.
She and her children are surviving on handouts from other homeless people who arrived earlier and are getting U.N. food. They have almost nothing themselves, but they at least have the compassion to help those who are even needier.
The world might also respond if people could see what is going on, but Sudan has barred most reporters from the area. I'm here because I accompanied Kofi Annan on a visit - bless him for coming! - and then jumped ship while here.
Magboula and the 2.2 million other homeless people from Darfur need food and shelter, and President Bush has been good about providing that. But above all they need the international community to shame Sudan for killing and raping people on the basis of their tribe. Each time Sudan has been subjected to strong moral pressure, it has backed off somewhat - but lately the attention has subsided, and Mr. Bush even killed the Senate-passed Darfur Accountability Act, which would have condemned the genocide.
What killed Magboula's husband and child was, indirectly, the world's moral indifference.
Others can still be saved if there is unrelenting pressure on Sudan to disarm the janjaweed, on intransigent Sudanese rebels to negotiate seriously for peace (instead of lounging about their hotel suites) and on governments like Egypt's and China's to stop being complicit in the Darfur genocide.
When Americans see suffering abroad on their television screens, as they did after the tsunami, they respond. I wish we had the Magboula Channel, showing her daily struggle to forge ahead through humiliation and hunger, struggling above all to keep her remaining children alive. If you multiply Magboula by 2.2 million, you get the reasons why we should care.
Or wait to see if the movie version is more powerful?
(The next winner of the Nobel Peace Prize winner)
June 14, 2005
Raped, Kidnapped and Silenced
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
No wonder the Pakistan government can't catch Osama bin Laden. It is too busy harassing, detaining - and now kidnapping - a gang-rape victim for daring to protest and for planning a visit to the United States.
Last fall I wrote about Mukhtaran Bibi, a woman who was sentenced by a tribal council in Pakistan to be gang-raped because of an infraction supposedly committed by her brother. Four men raped Ms. Mukhtaran, then village leaders forced her to walk home nearly naked in front of a jeering crowd of 300.
Ms. Mukhtaran was supposed to have committed suicide. Instead, with the backing of a local Islamic leader, she fought back and testified against her persecutors. Six were convicted.
Then Ms. Mukhtaran, who believed that the best way to overcome such abuses was through better education, used her compensation money to start two schools in her village, one for boys and the other for girls. She went out of her way to enroll the children of her attackers in the schools, showing that she bore no grudges.
Readers of my column sent in more than $133,000 for her. Mercy Corps, a U.S. aid organization, has helped her administer the money, and she has expanded the schools, started a shelter for abused women and bought a van that is used as an ambulance for the area. She has also emerged as a ferocious spokeswoman against honor killings, rapes and acid attacks on women. (If you want to help her, please don't send checks to me but to Mercy Corps, with "Mukhtaran Bibi" in the memo line: 3015 S.W. First, Portland, Ore. 97201.)
A group of Pakistani-Americans invited Ms. Mukhtaran to visit the U.S. starting this Saturday (see www.4anaa.org). Then a few days ago, the Pakistani government went berserk.
On Thursday, the authorities put Ms. Mukhtaran under house arrest - to stop her from speaking out. In phone conversations in the last few days, she said that when she tried to step outside, police pointed their guns at her. To silence her, the police cut off her land line.
After she had been detained, a court ordered her attackers released, putting her life in jeopardy. That happened on a Friday afternoon, when the courts do not normally operate, and apparently was a warning to Ms. Mukhtaran to shut up. Instead, Ms. Mukhtaran continued her protests by cellphone. But at dawn yesterday the police bustled her off, and there's been no word from her since. Her cellphone doesn't answer.
Asma Jahangir, a Pakistani lawyer who is head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said she had learned that Ms. Mukhtaran was taken to Islamabad, furiously berated and told that President Pervez Musharraf was very angry with her. She was led sobbing to detention at a secret location. She is barred from contacting anyone, including her lawyer.
"She's in their custody, in illegal custody," Ms. Jahangir said. "They have gone completely crazy."
Even if Ms. Mukhtaran were released, airports have been alerted to bar her from leaving the country. According to Dawn, a Karachi newspaper, the government took this step, "fearing that she might malign Pakistan's image."
Excuse me, but Ms. Mukhtaran, a symbol of courage and altruism, is the best hope for Pakistan's image. The threat to Pakistan's image comes from President Musharraf for all this thuggish behavior.
I've been sympathetic to Mr. Musharraf till now, despite his nuclear negligence, partly because he's cooperated in the war on terrorism and partly because he has done a good job nurturing Pakistan's economic growth, which in the long run is probably the best way to fight fundamentalism. So even when Mr. Musharraf denied me visas all this year, to block me from visiting Ms. Mukhtaran again and writing a follow-up column, I bit my tongue.
But now President Musharraf has gone nuts.
"This is all because they think they have the support of the U.S. and can get away with murder," Ms. Jahangir said. Indeed, on Friday, just as all this was happening, President Bush received Pakistan's foreign minister in the White House and praised President Musharraf's "bold leadership."
So, Mr. Bush, how about asking Mr. Musharraf to focus on finding Osama, instead of kidnapping rape victims who speak out? And invite Ms. Mukhtaran to the Oval Office - to show that Americans stand not only with generals who seize power, but also with ordinary people of extraordinary courage.
E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com
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Resources
For more information about Mukhtaran Bibi, see www.4anaa.org/projects/mukhtaran-mai.htm. That's on the Web site of the Asian-American Network Against Abuse of Women, run by a group of Pakistani doctors, and it's also the group that is arranging her visit to the U.S. In addition, see www.mercycorps.org. Mercy Corps is working with Ms. Mukhtaran in administering the funds that Times readers sent for her.
