A Girifna ProtestThe Sudanese National Security Forces have arrested Nagi Musa and nine other leaders of Girifna, the nonviolent people's resistance movement in Eastern Sudan.
On Wednesday, 25 January, Nagi Musa was leading a conference titled, "The Massacre in Port Sudan and the Crisis in East Sudan." Nagi Musa's conference commemorated the seventh anniversary of the massacre.
Abdalgader Albagrmi's office sits above a vault piled high with gold. It's the dwindling pile of cash next to the bullion, however, that keeps the Libyan rebels' deputy Central Bank chief up at night.
As that pile shrinks, so too does the chance of funding and sustaining a revolution to oust one of the world's longest-serving dictators.
If the cash-flow problem "isn't solved in the next few days, there's going to be a problem here," Albagrmi said, speaking from his office in Benghazi, the northeast Mediterranean port that has become the rebels' de facto capital.
What saddens me about this news, though, is not the horridness of the act or surprise at the appearance of a 'new low' for the Islamic Republic of Iran. What angers me, what I mourn, is my own impotence or rather our collective paralysis vis-a-vis this regime.
Our failure to unite, our failure to accept our differences and rally under one flag, our failure to create a viable leadership for the opposition, our failure to meet the courage of those who have more of it than we do, our failure as an united opposition is responsible for her tragic death. It is this that I mourn. This helplessness that I feel, this paralyzing distance that separates me from the hallowed ground on which Haleh and others have shed their blood is why I weep.
When thousands took to the World Wide Web from Tehran to protest the result of the presidential elections the summer of 2009, traditional western media's first instinct was to turn a blind eye. It wasn't until days later when massive networks of activists and students were operating strictly through Twitter that outlets like CNN finally figured out covering this phenomenon was probably worth their while. Unfortunately after everything was said and done, many of my fellow journalists in newsrooms across the world concluded the Tehran Twitter protests were an isolated occurrence --- until now. After weeks of unrest in Tunisia seen only through videos uploaded on Facebook, it seems as our psychological apprehension to rely on social networks as a news source will finally come to an end.
This Tribunal is no longer about justice. To weigh one man's death against the lives of four million Lebanese and countless other millions who could be caught up in a regional conflagration is sheer madness.
Imagine the trauma of this Levantine nation as the trial draws out, day after day, week after week, month after month - creating divisions, frictions, suspicions to the detriment of Lebanon's fledgling government which has made admirable strides in maintaining its equilibrium and learning the art of compromise this past year.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 9:05