corrente

And while we're on the subject of Africa, the Village Voice has a number of meaningful pieces, including this one from Nat Hentoff on what may be at the bottom of Bush's hypocritical hesitation to intervene in the affairs of Darfur--the agreement with the Sudanese government to feed us info on terrorists:

"Why have Bush, Rice, and the rest of the administration betrayed the black-Africans being slaughtered in Sudan? The answers are in a detailed report by Ken Silverstein in the April 29 Los Angeles Times, "Official Pariah Sudan Valuable to America's War on Terrorism."
Silverstein writes, the CIA sent "an executive jet...to ferry the chief of Sudan's intelligence agency [the Mukhabarat] to Washington for secret meetings [with CIA officials] sealing Khartoum's sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the administration, U.S. government officials confirmed.
As Silverstein notes, the head of Sudan's equivalent of the CIA, Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh, was Khartoum's liaison with Osama bin Laden when that Al Qaeda flourished in Sudan during the 1990s. More recently, members of Congress have charged General Gosh and some of his colleagues in Khartoum with "directing military attacks against civilians in Darfur."
With their blood on his hands, General Gosh told the L.A. Times, "We have a strong partnership with the CIA. The information we have provided has been very useful to the United States."
General Gosh was not understating how valuable his partnership with the CIA has been, and continues to be, to the United States—so valuable that last October, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service confirmed that while Gosh has indeed been among those playing "key roles" in the genocide in Darfur, the Bush administration is "concerned that going after these individuals could disrupt cooperation on counter-terrorism."

He goes on to identify specific acts of omission committed by the Bush administration to protect Sudan's government in exchange for the relevant data. Rather like the convenient relationship we've had with Uzbekistan, methinks.

And then there is the post by the admirable Ward Harkavy on Wolfie's new gig at the World Bank, and how much impact we can expect it to have on the ongoing African crises. (His opinion is: "Not much.") But linked to that post is a story by the IRIN arm of the UN on the tragedy in the Congo that manages to highlight, in an almost throwaway manner, an even more cruel twist to the already ghastly atrocities committed there--Viagra as a weapon of war:

""Most of these rapes were by the Interahamwe but some were by members of the national army," Stanilas Bya Mungu, GTZ project manager in Bukavu, told IRIN.
Army dissidents led by Mutebutsi and Nkunda carried out rapes systematically during their occupation of Bukavu, he said. The dissidents, he said, targeted neighbourhoods then went from house to house to rape victims ranging from one to 80 years old.
"We noticed that Viagra was attributed to [Mutebutsi's] military," he said.
The dissidents, he added, broke into four medical distribution centres in the city and took the viagra."

I'll spare you the evil details. If Africa has not yet become the seventh circle of Hell, I'd surely like to know where it is.

But don't worry. Our precious tax dollars and marching freedom won't be squandered there.