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In a pointed gesture, the U.S. Olympic team has voted Lopez Lomong, a member of the track team who gained American citizenship in 2007 after fleeing Sudan and spending a decade in a Kenyan refugee camp, as its flag bearer for the opening ceremony in Beijing.

Lomong was abducted at age six by militiamen looking to recruit child soliders. He managed to escape with two other boys and was grabbed by Kenyan authorities after he unknowingly crossed the border. Lomong was one of the 4,000 "lost boys" of Sudan who were resettled in foster homes throughout the United States in 2001. Lomong is also currently a member of the Team Darfur activist group whose cofounder -- American speedskater and Turin gold medalist Joey Cheek -- had his visa revoked by Chinese authorities two days ago.

Lomong's selection is certainly a touching gesture from his fellow athletes, and the Sudanese-American runner is ecstatic, saying that Friday will be "the happiest day" of his life. What effect it will have on U.S.-China relations is uncertain, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that China will not be able to hide from its Darfur policy simply by putting on the world's biggest fireworks show and wowing foreign dignitaries.

I would be absolutely shocked if the Olympics pass without some sort of dramatic protest or political statement from an athlete or group of athletes, on a podium or elsewhere. One English basketball player, formerly with the Cleveland Cavaliers and Orlando Magic, has said that Olympians have an obligation to speak out against China.

It may not be 1968, but that doesn't mean the gloves won't come off.

SALAH OMAR/AFP/Getty Images

Earlier this month, the International Criminal Court charged Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir with genocide for atrocities committed in the ongoing Darfur conflict. Proclaiming his innocence, Bashir responded in the way that any peace-loving leader concerned over his citizens would -- by threatening to murder even more people.

The ICC's announcement was by no means binding. The United Nations Security Council has split over a proposal by Libya and South Africa to prevent Bashir's indictment. The United States, Britain and France appeared to be quite skeptical of this plan, but South Africa has argued that prosecuting Bashir would jeopardize African Union efforts at peacekeeping in the region. South African President Thabo Mbeki explained that the peace process "require[s] very serious input by Bashir" and said "it doesn't help at this time to be considering these indictments."

The only thing less surprising than South Africa's president trying to give a free ride to someone who has committed war crimes against his own people is that they're joined on this mission by the humanitarians in Beijing. China's envoy to Sudan warned last week that the ICC's steps and Bashir's indictment could imperil the peace process in Darfur.

This logic actually makes sense. Bashir, China, and passive African leaders have been instrumental in the implementation of Darfur's genocide, so it follows that they play an active role in solving it, and it's even more important that they avoid repercussions for their actions.

Well, somebody's willing to step up and defend Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who was indicted for genocide last week. Yesterday, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described the International Criminal Court's prosecution as a colonialist effort to undermine Sudan's sovereignty:

Colonialist powers want to cut Sudan into pieces in their own ways, they want to prevent this country from having a constructive role in Africa and the Islamic world."

The comments were made at a meeting in Tehran with a Sudanese envoy who reciprocated his host's kind words by praising Iran's controversial nuclear program, saying, "This civilian technology would benefit the entire Islamic world."

I guess when you're under U.N. sanction, it can be hard to find someone who can relate.

Isam Al-Haj/AFP/Getty Images

If the International Criminal Court is about to issue an arrest warrant for you on charges of genocide, what might be the worst way to project an air of innocence to the world? Cue Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whose strategy of choice in the face of international criminal charges is to threaten more violence.

Yesterday, Bashir's party issued a statement on state TV declaring that any indictment against the president -- which was issued this morning -- would cause "more violence and blood" in Darfur. Funny, since I could have sworn that Bashir has always claimed that he has no control over the atrocities there.

sudantribune.com

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is not pleased about last weekend's brazen attack by Darfur rebels. It was the first time fighting has reached the outskirts of Khartoum not just in the bloody five years of fighting in Darfur, but in  the decades of conflict in Sudan.

Bashir is so peeved that he's put an astonishing $250 million reward on the head of rebel leader Khalil Ibrahim (pictured). For reference, that's 10 times the reward for Osama bin Laden.

Why the enormous bounty? Perhaps Ibrahim's fighting words have Bashir concerned. Here's Ibrahim in an interview yesterday, according to the IHT:

This is just the start of a process, and the end is the termination of this regime...Don't expect just one more attack. This is just the beginning."

Bashir also cut diplomatic ties with Chad on Sunday, accusing Chadian President Idriss Deby, who is from the same tribe as Ibrahim, of backing the attack. This is going to get worse before it gets better. 

UPDATE: If $250 mil sounds like an absurd amount (and it does), then that's because it is. When it was reported by the Sudanese state media yesterday, it came across as just another attention-getting ploy, and that if someone actually caught Ibrahim, Bashir and his cronies would make the bounty hunter an offer he couldn't refuse, and he'd go away with far, far less. But try three zeros less: Apparently, there was currency confusion in the Sudanese government. The reward of 500 million Sudanese pounds (the equivalent of $250 mil) was offered in new Sudanese pounds, according to state media. The country revalued its currency last year, and the new pounds are worth 1,000 times the old ones. But the information office came out today and said that they're using old Sudanese pounds for some reason, so we're talking peanuts for Ibrahim: $250,000.

She [Condoleezza Rice] can lick her elbow* if she thinks that Khartoum will kneel down to her conditions and accept pressure from her or the international community.

That's a quote from Nafi Ali Nafi, the advisor to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in charge of the Darfur file. "It is not clear why the Sudanese official chose Rice as a target for fierce criticism using this slang language," the Sudan Tribune dryly notes. According to the paper, to tell someone to lick their own elbow in Sudanese is to describe "something that is very unlikely to happen."

THOMAS COEX/AFP/Getty Images

European military commanders have formally approved an EU mission to Chad and the Central African Republic. The mission, to protect and aid refugees from Darfur, has a Security Council mandate and, by most accounts, could help stabilize a dangerous situation.

But there is a danger that France—and perhaps Europe more broadly—is developing a perverse specialty: cleaning up after crimes it doesn't have the will to stop. European peacekeepers labored for several hard years protecting humanitarian aid deliveries in Bosnia as ethnic cleansing proceeded around them. And remember that it was the French who sent a military mission to protect refugees after the Rwanda genocide. That mission, Opération Turquoise, saved some lives (including the lives of many who committed the genocide), but was a pale shadow of the rescue mission that should have been launched weeks earlier.

My fear is that the combination of feel-good war crimes prosecutions and post hoc band-aid operations like this new one in Chad have sapped the will to take the needed hard measures.  

Save Darfur Coalition

A torch relay is making its way around the world, but it's not the official Olympics torch relay. It's a torch relay to highlight Olympic host China's connections to Darfur, the region of Sudan wracked with genocide. The torch relay, sponsored by Olympic Dream for Darfur, the Save Darfur Coalition, and others, has already traveled thousands of miles through past genocide sites in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Armenia.

On Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day, the torch arrived in Washington, D.C., to make stops at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the White House, and the Sudanese embassy before finally converging on the Chinese embassy, as shown in this photo. From left to right at the podium are: radio personality Joe Madison (a.k.a. "the Black Eagle"); actress Mia Farrow; Motasim Adam of the Darfur People's Association of New York; Mohamed Yahya, a Darfurian with the Damanga Coalition for Freedom and Democracy; and Olympic medalist Joey Cheek.

The already beleaguered (if yet to be deployed) peacekeeping force for Sudan has drawn fire from an unexpected quarter. Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University's Earth Institute, reportedly dismissed the peacekeeping effort as irrelevant yesterday:

You could put the peacekeepers in there, they won't change one iota on the ground in terms of the grim realities of the harshness of life in Darfur," Sachs said, pointing to the need for clinics, schools, electricity and water holes. "I'm not against the peacekeepers, I just find them a waste of money," he said. "Unless the rich world is going to promise $2.6 billion for the peacekeepers each year, plus $2.6 billion for development, I'd say keep your peacekeepers."

The implication is that Darfur is an economic development problem rather than a problem of noxious political leadership and calculated policy. I wonder how far this reasoning extends; what other mass atrocities should be deemed development problems that cannot be addressed absent a massive aid program? Taken too far, this kind of economic determinism will suck the life out of international efforts to combat mass atrocities. And it's not as if the world needs another excuse to look the other way.

ISAM AL-HAJ/AFP/Getty Images

It's hard to avoid the impression that the teddy-bear imbroglio in Sudan was a piece of elaborate theater designed to give Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir a chance to magnanimously pardon the offender and thereby chalk up some brownie points with the West. Just scanning the headlines, one would have the impression that Bashir has courageously faced down the mob that was baying for the hapless schoolteacher's blood. Bashir's spokesperson is certainly cultivating that storyline:

There was a political risk in this decision. Although the pardon is a presidential prerogative, because of the rising feeling and tensions that have been generated many Sudanese will see it as unfair to them and that it might encourage others to do the same.The president considered the intentions behind the actions when he made this decision [to pardon]. 

The wise moderate in the midst of extremists—it's not a bad image to have as frustration grows over delays on Darfur peacekeeping. 

AFP/Getty Images

So, British teacher Gillian Gibbons is going to a Sudanese jail for 15 days for insulting religion by allowing her class of primary school children to name a teddy bear "Mohammed." (Since she has already served five days, she only has 10 left.) Gibbons escaped a far harsher potential punishment. If she had been found guilty of all three charges levied against her (the others were inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs), she could have faced 40 lashes and six months in prison.  

British Foreign Secretary David Milband has already hauled the Sudanese ambassador into his office to express "in the strongest terms" his concern about her arrest. During their meeting, he also spoke on the phone to Sudan's acting foreign minister.

Will Prime Minister Gordon Brown also get involved? This case reminds me of the infamous Singapore case of 1994, when American teenager Michael Fay was sentenced to a fine and six lashes with a cane for vandalizing cars and stealing road signs. Two dozen U.S. senators wrote letters to Singapore asking for clemency. But it wasn't until after President Clinton complained to his counterpart in Singapore that Fay's sentence was reduced to four lashes. 

At the time, Singapore protested that the United States shouldn't get involved with its domestic affairs. So far, the case of the British schoolteacher hasn't touched on the always-touchy issue of sovereignty, but will it? And should it?

It seems to me that in both cases, there's been a fair, but not necessarily satisfactory, result. In the case of Michael Fay, the laws were clearly laid out, the punishment was defined, and the sentence enforced, albeit at a softer level due to diplomacy. In the case of Gillian Gibbons, the laws may not have been laid out as clearly, but given the tensions between Islam and the West, Gibbons should have perhaps been more sensitive about what can be given the name "Mohammed" and acted more cautiously. Forty lashes and six months in prison—to say nothing of being shot, which is what some in Khartoum are calling for—would have been outrageous for an innocent mistake. But the fact that the Sudanese courts sentenced her to a few days in jail, given the alternative, seems to be an acceptable compromise that shows a modicum of respect for Sudanese sovereignty. Better yet would be if they would just release her right now and end this farce.

Newsweek has posted a remarkable—and remarkably bitter—debate between two experts on Darfur: Alex de Waal and John Prendergast. They cover a lot of ground but home in on the question of whether the "Save Darfur" campaign (with which Prendergast is affiliated) has had some unintended negative consequences, notably making the various rebel factions in Darfur more intransigent than they might have been otherwise. As de Waal puts it:

But my serious point here is about how advocacy does influence both rhetoric and policy (and rhetoric can become policy) and how it changes the structure of incentives of peace processes.... the activist campaign had raised the promise of a military intervention with direct guarantees, and that was the message that got through... the question I want to pose, for our own learning and for future activism, is the following: do we run the danger of encouraging rebels to aim too high in their demands, and risk them rejecting workable deals in favor of unrealizable dreams? That's a serious question that demands a serious debate.

Read the whole exchange here.

AFP/Getty Images

Jimmy Carter is in Darfur today as part of the awkwardly titled "Elders" delegation of elder statesman. The former U.S. president was forcibly barred from visiting with refugees in the town of Kabkabiya by his Sudanese minders. After being told his visit "wasn't on the program," Carter protested by yelling, "I'll tell President Bashir about this." 

...uh, which will be a lesson in futility, Jimmy. I seriously hope Carter doesn't actually think that complaining about lack of access to victims in Darfur will make a difference to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. He presides over a government responsible for much of the violence and is expert at creating a news vacuum into which news about the horrific conditions in Darfur disappear. After all, why is there such a potent debate over the number of dead in Darfur? Because Bashir doesn't want the number to be established.

Carter's toothless threat brings to mind an episode from The Confidante, Glenn Kessler's recent book on Condi. When the U.S. Secretary of State traveled to Khartoum in July 2005 to meet with Bashir, there was nearly an international incident over the fact that Bashir's thugs refused to allow either Rice's aides or the press corps into the room where they were meeting. Eventually, after some shoving and yelling and impolite negotiations, press members made it into the room, but were told they couldn't ask questions. Kessler describes the incident in his book:

The reporters awkwardly looked at each other, wondering who would speak first, when NBC's Andrea Mitchell decided to take the plunge: "Mr. President, tell us why is the violence continuing?" One of the Sudanese officials started shouting, "No, no, no." "Why should Americans believe your promises" regarding Darfur, she continued in her best shouted television voice, when "your government is still supporting the militias?"

Bashir, with a smile frozen on his face, snapped at the guards in Arabic, "Don't let her." Mitchell kept yelling her questions. Bashir, looking increasingly upset, gestured with his arms. "Finished," he shouted.

The guards pounced, dragging Mitchell away by twisting her arms as [Rice aide Jim] Wilkinson shouted, "Get your hands off her!" When Mitchell started getting teary-eyed, one of the Sudanese officials smirked and loudly declared that she was drunk (which is how the official Sudanese news agency portrayed the incident). They hustled the rest of the reporters out of the room.

Watch Mitchell get hauled away here.

Perhaps Jimmy thinks that Bashir has had a change of heart based on the government's pledge today to devote $300 million in order to "rebuild and repair" Darfur ($200 million of it, by the way, will be a loan from China). But it's blood money. Four years in, and we're still talking about a guy responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people donating a nominal sum from his oil revenues to cover up the rest of his crimes. It doesn't sound like progress.

STUART PRICE/AFP/Getty Images

Gen. Martin Luther Agwai of Nigeria is about to lead the world's largest peacekeeping operation into Darfur. In an open letter to Agwai today, Romeo Dallaire, who led the U.N.'s failed peacekeeping force in Rwanda, has this uplifting advice:

You can anticipate being let down by everyone on whom you depend for support, be that troops, funding, logistics or political engagement....

Bear in mind that whoever fails you will, in the end, be the most active in blaming you for whatever goes wrong.

No joke: Reuters's Darfur correspondent's name is ... Opheera McDoom.

Another noteworthy item is that the Reuters style guide apparently mandates that reporters refrain from referring to "refugee camps" in Darfur, preferring the simple "camp" designation. Is that because militants may be living among refugees in these sites?

STUART PRICE/AFP/Getty Images

Last Sunday, Time's Africa correspondent, Sam Dealey, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times chiding Western aid groups for using 400,000 as the number of people killed in Darfur, a number Dealey says has no basis in fact. It's the same tack that the European-Sudanese Public Affairs Council is taking, insisting to the BBC that the 400,000 figure comes from shoddy statistics work. (Their position is understandable; the Council is made up of businesses with interests in Sudan, many of them with links to the government.)

In response, Eric Reeves, one of the most respected Darfur analysts working today who has himself done mortality estimates for the troubled region, slammed Dealey's piece as a "truly disgraceful and destructive piece of shoddy work." In a two-part series last year, Reeves did an admirable job of marshaling nearly all of the quantitative evidence available on mortality in Darfur, and concluded that the number of deaths in Darfur—from violence, disease, and malnutrition—was likely in the neighborhood of 450,000. It's no surprise then that Reeves takes offense at Dealey's accusation: that those who use the 400K figure not only do so with little corroborating evidence, but that they actually harm the Darfur debate by angering Khartoum and desensitizing the public to future crises—making real action that much more difficult. 

Determining the number of dead in Darfur is obviously a vitally important task. And we should of course refrain from repeating numbers that have no basis; it's too tragically common that a statistic is cited and then repeated ad nauseum until it's essentially unquestioned by the public. But Reeves makes a crucial point that I think complicates Dealey's criticism: We ultimately can't seriously establish Darfur mortality rates because Khartoum doesn't want them to be established. They allow the security situation to remain too dangerous for U.N. teams to conduct studies, which seems to be an unspoken, official policy. By cutting off the data supply, Khartoum can continue to insist (and commentators such as Dealey can echo) that a number like 400,000 is grossly exaggerated. 

So, while I tend to agree with Reeves that the 200K figure often cited in the press is probably on the low end, what is perhaps most tragic is that the higher figure may actually serve to paralyze action through simply psychological forces. In a fascinating piece earlier this year, Paul Slovic argued that people can become numbed by numbers, unable to grasp the gravity of huge numbers of dead and wounded. If he is right, it may make no difference to the public whether 200K or 400K have been killed in Darfur. That in itself is a numbing thought. 

The good news on the recently approved U.N. mission to Darfur is that troop pledges are rolling in at a healthy clip. By design, African countries have taken the lead:

The largest offers of new infantry troops have come from Rwanda, Ethiopia and Egypt, all African nations, with pledges from Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda as well as Asians Bangladesh, Jordan, Malaysia, Nepal and Thailand, U.N. officials said. Police units are pledged from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Egypt, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal and Pakistan.

Pledges and deployments are not the same, however, and it will likely take several months for the force to actually arrive. Heavy airlift support from the United States will be critical.

More troubling is the weak mandate that these troops will have. Getting the force approved by the U.N. Security Council (read: China) meant watering down its instructions and removing its authority to disarm militias. U.N.-watchers should experience a twinge of déja vu at this point. Two major peacekeeping missions in the 1990s, to Somalia and Bosnia, floundered because the politicians that sent it adopted a too narrow vision of security. The force in Somalia never seriously attempted to disarm the country's marauding warlords, and the UNPROFOR mission in Bosnia disastrously confined itself to protecting humanitarian aid even as ethnic cleansing proceeded around it (see Srebrenica, Fall Of).  

The mainly Western backers of the Darfur mission have wagered that a substantial U.N. presence itself will deter further atrocities and calm tensions. It's at least possible. But let's be clear: this mission's success will depend on the political calculations of the Sudanese government and the rebel forces. The blue helmets will not have the authority to impose their own solutions.

Back in April, Christine flagged the effort by Google and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to map the atrocities committed in Darfur using images from Google Earth. That undertaking is now joined by the Eyes on Darfur project, which allows Web surfers to view before-and-after high-resolution satellite images of destroyed villages in Darfur and eastern Chad, as well as monitor a dozen villages currently at risk. Launched this month by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Amnesty International, the project aims to add images from commercial satellites to the online database every few days in order to monitor vulnerable areas and create a record of abuses committed. 

Of course, Sudanese President Omar Bashir probably doesn't even care that the world is watching. This is, after all, the same guy who appointed Ahmed Harun in charge of dealing with the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Harun, formerly Sudan's minister of the interior, was indicted in April by the ICC for allegedly coordinating murders and rapes of civilians in Darfur through funding and inciting janjaweed militias over the past several years. It's a gross irony that he's now in charge of helping and protecting the same people he's been accused of terrorizing. But then, that's just business as usual in Khartoum these days.

Yet U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon seems cautiously optimistic that his new agreement with Bashir on a peacekeeping force will finally put a stop to the violence. With Eyes on Darfur, we'll be able to see for ourselves just how well that deal is working.

We've all heard about students around the world who aspire to learn English so they can get well-paying jobs. But for students in Sudan, the language to learn is Chinese.

Sudan sells around 60 percent of its oil to China, and Chinese companies, products, and restaurants have made inroads into the African country. Sudanese university students who learn Chinese can get jobs as translators and work for Chinese oil and telecommunications companies. Recently, Khartoum University had a Chinese speech competition, and a Chinese professor there said, "… nearly 100% of students who graduate from the department get jobs with Chinese companies." In a troubled country like Sudan, that prospect is a great motivator to learn the language.

More than a billion people speak Mandarin Chinese, and the Chinese government actively promotes the language as a way of extending its influence. The country has sent hundreds of teachers to Africa, and it has established "Confucius Institutes" around the globe to encourage speaking the language.

And the trend to learn Mandarin Chinese isn't limited to Sudan. In Britain, the number of university students studying Chinese more than doubled from 2002 to 2005. Other Western countries have had similar increases.

In the near term, Mandarin isn't going to displace English as the world's global language. But at the end of the day, money talks. A few decades from now, money could be talking in yuan, not dollars.

iStockphoto.com

In response to Bush's announcement yesterday of tough new economic sanctions against Sudan, the Sudanese ambassador to the United States rented a room at the National Press Club in Washington and threatened to retaliate. His weapon? My favorite carbonated beverage.

I want you to know that the gum arabic which runs all the soft drinks all over the world, including the United States, mainly 80 percent is imported from my country," the ambassador said after raising a bottle of Coca-Cola.

A reporter asked if Sudan was threatening to "stop the export of gum arabic and bring down the Western world."

"I can stop that gum arabic and all of us will have lost this," Khartoum Karl warned anew, beckoning to the Coke bottle. "But I don't want to go that way."

Hats off to Dana Milbank for his column on the bizarre spectacle. Don't miss his video diary of the event.