Thanks, Ken, for the reference to the Gaza/Israeli standoff, as it could be called.
True, some Israelis publicly distance themselves from or even actively fight against such aspects of Israeli strategy.
As Moses points out though, the Syrian opposition has been calling for help. If I remember well, voices from besieged Homs made such a call, like that made from once besieged Benghazi, leading to the imposition of the NATO no fly zone in relation to Benghazi. . I dont recall Hams being given such assistance as requested.
The Agency of the Helper and the Agency of the HelpedSome conflicts, though, may also be better understood in terms of the agency of those being helped as well as that of the helper.
The Nigerian Civil War Biafran situation that Chielo references is one such.
This situation presents a complex one that necessitates examination of not only the agenda of the helper but the agency of the person being helped.
To what degree is that assistance guiding the person being helped to a realistic understanding of and response to their circumstances and to what degree does it blind them to such an appreciation?
Within this context, the picture is one in which the person being helped is not always passive but may also represent groups who can be described as managing such help in ways that are of controversial benefit to other groups within their ranks.
The Question of Choice Among the Roads Open to Biafra from the Fall of Port-Harcourt in 1968 Chielo states that fellow Nigerians had condemned people like himself, starving Biafrans, to death.
In that context, therefore, he states, would he care about the ideological color of those who came to save him and enable him to remain alive to write about this incident?
On the other hand, it has been stated by at least one Western source that relief into Biafra prolonged the war and the suffering of the Biafrans.
It has been argued that Biafra was effectively defeated by the fall of Port Harcourt in 1968, at which point the entire South East, where Biafra had become localised, was surrounded by Federal troops.
Biafra was greatly handicapped in terms of equipment and personnel. Mobilizing the resources to break out of the bottleneck in the landlocked Igbo region where the fighting had become concentrated would have been a miracle. It was inevitable that food would run out, with disastrous consequences.
It may be argued that carefully negotiated surrender was the wisest choice at that point.
Yet, Biafra fought on till 1970 in which period the iconic image of the starving Biafran child was born.
It has been argued by various insiders within Biafra that the ideological victory of the more belligerent Biafran leaders was what continued to fuel the war from the Biafran side.
This fueling was sustained by a very successful propaganda system sustaining Biafra's moral imperative as crafted by its leaders, invoking sympathy in the eyes of both Biafrans and the outside world and attracting military assistance.
Meanwhile, as far as I can see, the stubborn geographical and strategic realities of the war were not addressed in terms of their desperate seriousness.
A central feature of the rationale to keep fighting from within Biafra was the notion that extermination was the price of surrender, a fear sustained by anti-Igbo pogroms in the Midwest and Asaba, of those I am certain of, and Federal attacks on Biafran civilians.
Were such fears in the event of surrender not better managed in the context of a peace treaty brokered by the various countries that arbitrated at various times in the conflict? Does the fact that the anticipated exterminations never took place at war's end in 1970 not suggest that the extermination fear might have been overplayed to the detriment of those who suffered the brunt of an unsustainable secession, civilians and rank and file soldiers?
The question in a situation like this is-not only what is the ideological colour of the helper but the effect on the psyche of the person being helped, an effect shaped by the ideological colour of the person being helped, the Biafran leadership and the effect of that ideology and the help being given on the majority of Biafrans.
Is it true that Biafran relief helped to sustain the illusion that Biafra was still a viable option from 1968?
Is the idea of no relief in the name of avoiding sustaining the illusion of a successful secession from 1968 a humanitarian option?
Is it not more humane to provide aid while pressing for a diplomatic solution?
If external initiative is to be credited for sustaining the illusion of the chances of Biafra is it not the aid of
Carl Gustav von Rosen in what as described as brief revival of the hitherto moribund Bifran air force?
thanks
toyin
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Moses Ochonu
<meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
And, another thing. The Iran analogy is problematic. The Iranian opposition has not crystallized in a way that would necessitate a foreign intervention or give it leverage to call for one. Do you honestly think that if the opposition pushed the envelope to a point where the state unleashed an Assad-like nationwide crackdown and a humanitarian catastrophe unfolded, the opposition members or the beleaguered Iranians would care about the nationality or ideology of the country that intervenes to save them from the murderous onslaught of their rulers?
Sent from my iPad
i like that response too, toyin
and yet, and yet
think about it for a second: my savior, no matter what the ideological color, is welcome?
what if the price for saving me is to kill large numbers of innocent people whom my savior determined were enemies?
an example?
for some time, rockets have been fired from gaza toward southern israel, at times coming into communities and harming people. as we all know, israel attacked gaza in response about a year or so ago, and 1000 palestinians were killed. ten israelis were killed in that operation, some from friendly fire.
anyway, the long history of israeli's conflict with the palestinians has been of that order: the protection of israelis from palestinians has cost the palestinians dearly, and there are a number of israelis for whom the "ideological color" of their "savior" has been too red, shall we say.
similarly, one doesn't hear, even from the syrians in opposition, or the iranians in opposition, much of a push for nato to intervene or for the u.s. to send in the marines. they realize that the color of the ideology would presage a price they couldn't possibly want to pay.
ken
On 3/30/12 9:00 AM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:
A good one from a response on the Chielo blog
'... at the end of the day the least that one can say is that [the] lot of the victim is so dire that he cannot quibble over the ideological colour of the ladder that will save his life.'
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 2:43 PM, kenneth harrow
<harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
ok ikhide, you insisted so i read it. it is fine. i don't disagree. yet it leaves out questions that have troubled me all along.
he says, get rid of the bad baggage--not unlike your continual complaints against white liberal attitudes (why white?? is anything added there? why not American, or global north?)
anyway, it says, keep the issue of alleviating suffering in key cases before our eyes, and don't walk away.
so, who is disagreeing there?
it says, subliminally, "us white guys (ok white there) are the solution, those black guys failed--we have the knowledge, follow us"
i want an open repudiation of colonialist discourses that we are now dubbing the white savior industrial complex discourse, ultimately because it is disempowering to africans, and it means that the only solution comes from Out There, which translates into, go Over There to complete your life's goals since Here has become a Lost Cause.
secondly, there needs to be some awareness that the joint monuc fardc attempt to chase down lra last time cost hundreds of lives, many more than would have been the case had they been ignored.
i don't want to ignore them, i want kony before the dock, but i want someone to acknowledge that simplistic appeals and solutions poorly thought through might cause more damage than the thing you are trying to fix.
as for the AU initiative, i have no idea if it will cause more damage or resolve the situation. maybe no one knows. however, i do know that the thoughtless interventions in sierra leone had prices as high as the damage they were intended to stop. i am talking about ecowas and
Weissman, Fabrice, ed. In the Shadow of "Just Wars where he shows that the horrors wrought by Charles Taylor (thanks Ghaddafi) were matched by the forces arrayed against him, including ecowas.
lastly, as the last email i sent concerning the continuing crisis in e congo shows, there have been more than 100, 000 people displaced in s kivu in recent fighting, in recent attacks, none by the lra.
so we can swat that mosquito, which is what the lra has now become, while continuing to ignore the elephant in the room, which is the damage wrought by the on-going trade for minerals, guns, in the region, which is made possible by the very people the KONY2012 video asks to fix the problem.
made possible how? how about more than a billion dollars worth of illegally mined gold passing through uganda last year. uganda would love to be asked to take care of the lra as long as everyone continues to ignore the greater ravages it bears responsibility for.
and none of the above even mentions their actions towards the acholi
ken
On 3/30/12 5:15 AM, Ikhide wrote:
Please, whatever you do, take time out to read Professor Chielozona Eze's perspective on the Invisible Children's KONY 2012 video. Eze, who himself survived Biafra as a child looks at the critics of the KONY 2012 video coolly in the eyes and tells them a few truth. This one is a must read. Please read and share. And while you are on his blog, subscribe to it. Eze is one of Africa's quiet literary revolutionaries, promoting the literature of Africa, one blogpost at a time. Applause. Read and share please. The world must hear of the atrocities going on in Africa while Western liberals and many African intellectuals overdose on navel-gazing.
- Ikhide
Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
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