THE GUNFIGHT AT DARFUR

I happened to tune into CNN the other night and caught Mia Farrow’s urgent plea for somebody to do something right away to stop the genocide in Darfur. She had just returned from her fourth visit to the area. The killing there has been going on for three years and has now spilled over into Eastern Chad. She had no words to describe the horror she had been exposed to after leaving yet again the artificial comfort and security of her own home and life, The shock of being out on the front lines of the real world, which the majority of mankind has to deal with, trying to let desperate mothers with starving babies and dazed men with gauged out eyes and hands severed, know that at least somebody in the global community cared, showed in her face and eyes. Behind the quiet desperation in her voice I sensed a note of hopeless frustration. She knew, like all of us knew, that with the UN and USA tied up in the tangle of domestic and international political manipulations, nothing of significance would be done.

As these realities impacted on my mind, something snapped inside and brought me out of in insidious hypnotic trance.

Her sincerity, as a woman, as sister and as a mother, appealing directly to me as a man, a brother and a father myself, telling me that other men, bad men, cruel men, were ruthlessly murdering innocent women and children, and inferring what was I going to do about it, cut directly through the artificial reality that I had surrendered my manhood to. I was faced by my own lethargy and reluctance to act personally to such an extreme challenge. My reality was fixed to my wallet and my decisions left to the whim of other men – useless do-nothing men, their own manhood caught up in the artificial power of numbers printed on notes and their civic ambitions twisted in the spin of redundant political ideologies that were revealing an increasing inability to deal with the exponential pressures that our burgeoning populations are currently exerting on the global community.

So, caught in this new sense of reality, with at least one eye now open, I am making the following proposal to millions of other men caught in the same trance: I propose the formation of a privately funded mercenary commando force, of company strength if possible, well armed, equipped with modern communication, and night-fighting capabilities, all well trained in bush warfare and properly supported, to go into Darfur and Eastern Chad and the Congo and start to put things right on the Mother Continent, by giving those roving gangs of thugs a taste of their own medicine.

I have some idea of what I am proposing. Born and raised in Africa, I have traveled much of the continent and spent the past forty years studying and seeking solutions to Her problems. I believe that a well-run mercenary mission designed specifically as a humanitarian relief operation, with long-term goals of repatriation in mind, is not only eminently doable – but desperately needed – and will be internationally applauded by every man and woman who has some gumption still left in them. Such private action stands a good chance of triggering a more positive global response to Africa and the 3rd World in general..

Any billionaire with humanitarian instincts, anxious to prove that privately-run enterprises can out-do government in any sphere of influence, and who might be interested in bankrolling this mission, better still even taking part in it, please contact me at: globalstats@hotmail.com