Dec 3, 2007 - Teddy bear row teacher Gillian Gibbons has been pardoned by the Sudanese Government and was released this morning.
Yes, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE TEDDY BEAR????
TT interviewed him in Khartoum last night over a phone smuggled in by a sympathetic guard.
Mohammed, the bear, wondered what kind of frivolous media would raise a storm of protest over the jailing of a single teacher when hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Sudanese remain in camps - some for over three years. Constantly hectored by Janjaweed, they wait for international intervention that won't come, only fake sympathy from self-righteous, self-serving, useless organizations that raise far more money for their own benefit than they do for others.
It is, he said, most unfortunate that refugees have the bad luck to be championed by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) who has never actually done anything about any crisis except continually inflate the numbers in order to justify even more fund raising for projects the expenditures for which they are never audited. It is sad to him that this hyperinflation does much to discredit the reality of the misery of those who flee violence. It, he points out, also serves to divert much-needed attention to solving the problem.
He's glad the teacher has the backing of a sane government. And he is sincerely glad that the teacher wasn't a Rwandan who needed the media intervention and U.N. assistance. Or a Cambodian, for that matter.
TT - There were, at last count, 3,550 articles on the pardon of the teacher.
OUCH Dec 6 - Alan Ferguson of The Vancouver Providence in "Uproar over a stuffed teddy bear drowns out the agony of Darfur" summed it up best:
It says a lot about us that we can obsess over a slow-witted teacher and a stuffed bear -- while covering our ears to the shrieks of women and children being raped and burned alive.
