March 2007

This could be an indication:

March 2, 2007 (Beijing) — China has left Iran, Sudan, and Nigeria off its latest list of resource-rich countries for which it will provide financial incentives to Chinese companies to invest in, the Financial Times reported.

The Chinese National Development and Reform Commission, the chief economic planning agency that also oversees energy policy, released the new list on Thursday.

The nine nations slated for further Chinese oil and gas investment are Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Morocco, Libya, Niger, Norway, Ecuador and Bolivia.

It is not clear whether the exclusion of Iran, Sudan and Nigeria came because Chinese companies already have short-term investment plans in the three countries, or for more political reasons.

China is under pressure from both the US and the European Union to stay out of, or use its leverage in, Iran and Sudan to change the policies of both countries on nuclear issues and human rights respectively.

Interesting.

They look good together don’t they?

And while there, AJ called Zionists the true manifestation of Satan. Maybe this might help him distinguish between the good and evil ones.

Long time readers of The Sudanese Thinker know that I’m a big fan of Eteraz.org. They, ehm you, also know that I’m not a fan of Jihad Watch. The reasons are obvious. Now while I’m a big fan of Eteraz.org and also a fan of its co-founder Ali Eteraz, I must say that there have been some few occassions in which I found Ali’s opinions to be distasteful and at times even offensive. On the other hand, I previously thought Robert Spencer to be a retarded dummy. I don’t think so anymore. For the past 3 months I followed his writings quite closely until I realized that Robert Spencer is indeed not your average hateful close-minded Islamophobe. He’s smart and he’s done a lot of reading on Islam but I certainly still do strongly disagree with his points of view. I can blog a post detailing why but it won’t come close to this one. Ali Eteraz has just written one of his best posts ever. What do you think?

UPDATE: The debate continues. Spencer responded and Ali replied. It’s an excellent discussion and I believe Ali has done a superb job.

Ahmed Mohamed Haroun is one of the two named by the ICC as suspected war criminals involved in Darfur. Today for the first time I saw a picture of him.

Does he look Arab to you? He doesn’t to me. In fact he looks Darfurian. But is he really? If yes, it would mean he’s either an Afro-Arab or an Arabized African. “Darfur is a genocide perpetrated by Arabs against Africans” is an oversimplification of what’s really happening. I hope the picture above is more proof of this. Furthermore, in an interview with the Sudanese newspaper Akhbar al-Youm, Ahmed mentioned something which I found quite odd.

The minister, who is suspected of war crimes in Darfur while he was minister of state in the Interior Ministry, defended his work in the troubled region of western Sudan, where tens of thousands of people have been killed since 2003.

“The police operation that took place in Darfur, with the deployment of thousands of policemen, remains one of the greatest operations ever by the Sudanese police,” he said.

The aim was to secure areas populated by the Fur people, who give their name to the region. “(That is) contrary to the prosecutor’s claim that we incited what are referred to as the Janjaweed against our kin the Fur,” he added.

Why would he/they only want to secure areas populated by the Fur tribe and why does he only refer to them? What about other tribes? Could Ahmed Haroun be a Fur? I asked my father and some of my friends’ fathers the same question. They all told me that he’s a Darfurian but they’re not sure what tribe he’s exactly from. Various things about this conflict are indeed complex, sometimes a little too complex.