Sudan’s Big Man gets a big boat
Tuesday, January 31, 2006 at 6:46PM ARTICLE: “Sudan Leader Waits, and Waits, for His Ship to Come In,” by Marc Lacey, New York Times, 31 January 2006, p. A4.
A heart-warming tale of the president of Sudan, recently denied chairmanship of the African Union (how to put him at the head of a peacekeeping organization when his own government promotes genocide within its borders?). Seems he’s had to endure a tremendously long wait for his $4-million-plus ab fab yacht to show up.
It’ll probably take a good chunk of the nation’s GDP to transport it to its final destination in this war-torn, incredibly impoverished land. But hey, a Big Man’s gotta do what a Big Man’s gotta do. Africa’s postcolonial history is littered by all manner of Big Men who lived luxuriously while wars raged and citizenry (always predominately women and kids) died in droves.
Would you like a system for getting rid of guys like this? Do you think it would take massive invading forces or do you think that if we showed enough determination, we could get someone like this Big Man to abandon ship with his women, money, loot and—in this instance—the ship as well?
Of course, if we couldn’t do anything after scaring off today’s Big Man, then nothing would change: more civil strife, more death and suffering, another Big Man to take his place a few months later. So drive-by regime change is no answer without the second-half effort by the SysAdmin force and related connectivity forces.
What would it take to make Sudan acceptable to global business? It probably wouldn’t look like any traditional aid package. No, it would be something different, something that fostered connectivity with great rapidly, and it would likely smack of multinationals performing something akin to a UN trusteeship. Of course, you’d probably end up with some Core contact group, plus the UN, plus the African Union, plus some Core constellation of a SysAdmin force (probably working to train up a longer-term AU peacekeeping force) overseeing the whole process. Sudan’s “sovereignty,” such as it was, would be trashed for some undetermined period of time. Cheap labor would be exploited, as would the oil reserves.
None of this would be pretty, but all of it would beat the hell out of the genocide we’ve all been witnessing from the sidelines for several years now.
In the end, wouldn’t you like to find out exactly how hard such a task would be? Don’t you think the world would be a better place for trying, instead of sitting on the sidelines watching the bodies pile up?
Reader Comments (3)
Sudan is an interesting case study for the SysAdmin function in globalisation. The function would be a commercially controlled UN trusteeship. Global economics is already in the driving seat, should it also be given the power to set both the perspective and framework for national politics? And in the process of the enforced conversion to whatever global rule-set the commercial trusteeship wishes to impose at the time, the 'sick' country would lose its sovereignty and its people would lose their democratic right to self-determination.
So global commerce officially - rather than unofficially - gets the right to set the political rules, determining the optimum governing arrangements everywhere and where and when to unleash the global Leviathan force.
As if the people of Sudan currently have their democratic right to self-determination.
There will always be disagreement about what is the best model for governing a nation. For example, here is a list of the governing arrangements throughout the world. Recent events in Palestine have further confused the matter. The UN trusteeship should really decide on the standard.