Word: africa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...White House's argument was bumping painfully and vainly through the courts, Justice Department officials were telling the Treasury Department, which oversees the Secret Service, that chances of prevailing in the matter were virtually nil. But Treasury officials, led by Robert Rubin--who spoke by telephone from Africa, where he was traveling--opted to go ahead anyway...
...this happening? Why are we seeing these wrenching pictures again? Isn't the U.N. doing its job? Didn't President Clinton go to Africa last spring and promise to pay more attention? Well, it seems Sudan is what the aid professionals euphemistically call a "complex emergency." In their terminology, a simple emergency is one that is either man-made or the result of natural disasters. A complex emergency is a catastrophe caused by man and nature working together to destroy. That definition fits Sudan's crisis to doleful perfection...
...there has been vicious warfare on and off since Sudan's independence in 1956. Africa's largest country is really two: an Islamic, Arabized north and a Christian, animist and African south. The government in Khartoum is headed by Lieut. General Omar Hassan al-Bashir, but the real power is Hassan al-Turabi, a radical scholar who leads the National Islamic Front and is intent on enforcing Muslim law on the land. On the battlefield, the shifting coalition led by John Garang's SPLA has been successful recently, opening a new front in the northeast. Officially the rebels are fighting...
...peace is the commodity the Sudanese people need most. Their starvation is all the worse because it is so unnecessary. Southern Sudan offers some of the most productive land in Africa, and the people who live there are hardworking farmers and herdsmen, past masters at raising cattle, coping with scanty rainfall and husbanding seeds. If the battles would only end, they could make it on their own. Instead, tens of thousands of them are likely to die in this famine and the next one, which is sure to come...
Then we sat immobile in traffic for the next four hours watching those we had beat to the bus walk past us as they made their way home. As they passed, one with a cup of coffee turned and waved back. Maybe I should have gone to East Africa...