Reading the Toronto Star for the Fear and Loathing Report I came across an article on Sudan, which continues to get worse., as the war leads to humanitarian crisis, as inevitably occurs. Most of the people who die in wars — I realize this is repeated over and over — don’t die from bullets or bombs, but from starvation and disease due to the collapse of infrastructures. The pattern of war in Sudan seems to me to be one drawn from paramilitary strategies around the world: the government backs militias to massacre and displace the civilian population to try to destroy an insurgency — or, simply, to use the insurgency as a pretext for displacing the people and promote a kind of ‘development without people’: sometimes the displacement is the point. That’s a common thread in Colombia: the saying goes, in Colombia it isn’t that there is displacement because of war. There is war so there can be displacement.
