OurPledge

As Lynsey Addario and Lydia Polgreen report in their new NYTimes article (“Expulsion of Aid Groups Raises Risks in Darfur”), Omar al-Bashir’s explusion of major aid organizations from Darfur was the plan all along:

“The decision to expel the aid groups appears to have been made well before the International Criminal Court announcement [to issue an arrest warrant against Bashir], and it was carried out with ruthless efficiency, aid groups said. Government forces arrived at the offices of several charities and ordered workers to leave, and then the forces seized valuable equipment like computers, cars and generators, according to aid officials here.”

“This was in the works for a long time,” one senior aid official involved in Darfur relief said. “They had been waiting for a chance to strike out at these organizations.”

The question remains: How will the Obama administration and the international community respond? And on our side of things, are we going to allow our public officials to do effectively nothing in the face of mass starvation and disease?