Blog Action Day 2007: Let us combat Desertification

Today, bloggers around the web are uniting to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. And as expected, I would like to join fellow bloggers from the rest of the world on this important issue. Last week, as I was searching for information on Darfur in preparation for the Stop the violence in Darfur post, I discovered that drought, desertification and overpopulation are some of the causes of the armed conflict.It is easy to see that the first two are purely environmental in nature. It has been reported that the conflict started when the Baggara nomads searching for water have to take their livestock further south, to a land mainly occupied by non-Arab farming communities. I think the government of Sudan saw this conflict coming. As a responsible government, it should have started looking for solutions to the environmental problems of Darfur from an early stage. And when the conflict finally broke out, it is very sad to see that the Sudanese government aggravating the situation by taking sides with the janjaweed against the non-Baggara people as if to suggest that the Baggara are better citizens.

The Darfur situation gives us an example of things to come if we do not combat desertification. A recent UN report noted that around 50 million people will be at risk of displacement due to severe desertification over the next 10 years, causing an "environmental crisis of global proportions". These risks threaten not just unstable regions, but also countries that are likely to experience the spillover of large-scale migration from areas directly impacted by a changing climate. Therefore, I would like to call upon different nations to join the United Nations in combating desertification. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) encourages member nations to develop both offensive stategems as well as defensive manoeuvres against desertification. In her summary, Heidi Strebel points out that the programmes implemented under the aegis of the Convention include reforestation projects, managed grazing methods, sustainable farming techniques, such as crop rotation, and efficient irrigation schemes.

Let me wind up this post by asking the different countries to invest in biofuels i.e. Jatropha for biodisel and Ethanol for petrol driven vehicles which are more environment friendly compared to traditional fossil fuels.

Stop the violence in Darfur!!!

This belated post serves as my contribution towards the BlogCatalog's blog against abuse challenge. I was supposed to publish it on 27 September as required but preparations for the IEEE Africon conference took up much of time before that day.

This post is dedicated to the war torn Darfur, a region in Western Sudan, bordering the Central African Republic, Libya, and Chad. An independent sultanate for several hundred years, it was incorporated into Sudan by Anglo-Egyptian forces. Darfur is currently in the midst of an armed conflict and resulting humanitarian emergency. The conflict broke out in February, 2003.One side of this conflict is composed mainly of the Sudanese military and the Janjaweed, a militia group recruited mostly from the Arab Baggara tribes of the northern Rizeigat, camel-herding nomads. The other side comprises a variety of rebel groups recruited primarily from the land-tilling Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit ethnic groups. It has been reported that the combination of decades of drought, desertification, and overpopulation are among the causes of the Darfur conflict. Due to the aforementioned problems, the Baggara nomads searching for water have to take their livestock further south, to a land mainly occupied by non-Arab farming communities.The Sudanese government, while publicly denying that it supports the Janjaweed, has provided money and assistance to the militia and has participated in joint attacks targeting the tribes from which the rebels draw support. If the Sudanese government was responsible enough, it should have been acting as a mediator between the two tribal groups instead of taking sides with one of them. Does this suggest that the Sudanese government supports the Arab-Baggara militia simply because they are fellow Arabs? Remember that both of these tribal groups (Baggara and non-Baggara) are predominantly Muslim.

The Sudanese government and Janjaweed attacks upon the non-Baggara people have resulted in killings, torture and rape of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and the destruction of hundreds of villages since 2003. Now, four years down the line, Darfur remains one of the world’s worst human rights and humanitarian catastrophes. Violence, human rights violations, disease and malnutrition still afflict the people of Darfur and conflict-affected civilians in eastern Chad and northern Central African Republic (CAR) every day. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost in the Darfur conflict, countless numbers of women and girls have been abducted, raped and otherwise abused, and more than 2.5 million Darfuri civilians have been uprooted from their homes, while many more depend on international aid to survive.

I would like to call upon the international community to, at long last, put a stop to these atrocities and bring relief to those who have survived but continue to suffer. I would like to ask you to join the growing movement of citizens worldwide who are taking action for Darfur by doing one or more of the following tasks:

1. Sign the Global Petition to End Violence in Darfur. Encourage your friends to sign this petition as well.
2. Write a letter the editor in response to an article in your local newspaper about Darfur. Take a look at the sample letter and guidelines here(PDF).
3. Join Amnesty International, on October 24, in delivering a half million Global Petition for Darfur signatures to the White House. You can also host a solidarity vigil in your home time. Get tips on how to organize the event from here (PDF).
4. If you are a blogger, you can help by blogging against the humanitarian abuses in Darfur. Please leave a link to your post in the comments section of this post. On 1 November, 2007, I will publish a post that will list all the blogs that will respond to my call :)

I am off to Africon

I will leave for Windhoek, Namibia where I will present my paper entitled Fuzzy Logic Congestion Control in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks: A Performance Evaluation at the IEEE Africon 2007. This will be a great experience for me having missed out on the IEEE Eurocon 2007 Conference. I will also co-chair a session on Signal Processing and Communications Systems. While away, my blogging activities will be limited, so bear with me as I will be back in full force next week.

I was supposed to join thousands of bloggers in a challenge to blog against abuse on the 27th of September 2007.My topic of choice on this day was Save Darfur but I will not publish it as yet because it is not a finished product. I do not want you my valued readers to read crap here. I will publish this one early next week.I hope BlogCatalog will bear with me.