It does not have any reasons to be there with the bigger world. More than 2.6 million -- almost 10 percent of its population -- are either starving or hungry.

More than 32 percent of its population cannot read or write, an average human being there does not live for more than 55 years. Its external debt is perilously close to its GDP and 30 percent of its people are jobless.Four decades after freedom, Sudan -- which means the Land of Blacks -- is still a crucible of refugees. It receives refugees from Ethiopia and Eritrea who flee civil wars and famine and sends outs its own people as refugees for the same reasons.

The image of Sudan to the world outside is a photograph: of a thin, skinny child clinging to the wrinkled breast of its undernourished mother. Maybe with a caption which is the footnote to its history of drought, famine, misery and endless human suffering.

Sudan does not fall on tourist maps. Chroniclers of ancient days wrote that Nero, who wanted to conquer the land which once traded spices, went back after seeing the vast papyrus swamps. Centuries later, the land remains barren, dry and poor. Poverty is not a pleasant sight, never a great backdrop for a holiday photograph.

But Sudan could be a good place to hide. No one will ask you unpleasant questions the-re as they have enough problems to live with.

Sudan is where the American President chose to flee -- to escape from the headlines of a sex scandal which threatened his presidency.

To hide from headlines back home, Clinton had to create a few somewhere else. He opted for a Dark World, far away from his sleepless nights, which will not come back to haunt him with stains of evidence. Ever.

Clinton cannot be singled out, that is the way American presidents have viewed the lesser world. A refuge for their superpower fantasies and a destination for their personal peregrinations.

However progressive and liberal he may be, Clinton fits the great American pattern. It does not matter whether it happens to be a familiar American trap for another country.

The US celebrates individual freedom and justice like no country else but at the same time has been callous and insensitive to the other world of the poor and the helpless. The irony has lost its sheen, it is now a cliche, over-used and worn out.

Idiosyncratic obsessions of the US have always found targets in lands of the underdeveloped. World's most tele-friendly democracy has helped prop up puppet regimes and has created banana republics, has thrown out elected rulers and has installed its stooges.

When Granada faded away from American memory, the US looked elsewhere. It raised funds from dirty deals to bankroll the Contras of Nicaragua.It never lacked targets: communists, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddaffi, crazy fundamentalists it helped thrive, and sometimes poor countries whose only sin was being poor.

The US did not learn from the terrible mistakes of the past or the lessons of Vietnam. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of Cold War did not change its mindset. It still has one set of laws for its own people and another for others.

That is why Clinton did not even show the contrived remorse that he displayed at his post-confessional telecast when his missiles reached a target in Khartoum.

The people who were wheeled into the hospital after they hit a factory which produced drugs for malaria and tuberculosis were poor. And nothing else.The thought of these people might not have even once crossed the consciousness of the man who directs the course of the world when he ordered the strike.

They would not have perhaps heard of a man called Bill Clinton let alone a White House intern called Monica Lewinsky.

They certainly did not know what he did to her or what she did to him. They only knew what he did to them.

Collective America can forget the White House intern and Ken Starr and toast the fact that Clinton has avenged the death of their men in Africa. Who cares if people who may have even otherwise died of hunger or malnutrition get killed in Clinton's revenge play.

When the US plays up the peccadilloes of its president, turns his personal life into an international soap opera and brings him to his knees, it shows how all men are equal in America. How justice catches up with even the powerful.

Next moment, it rings in the reality that all men are equal but not in a cursed country in Africa.

Bill Clinton's sex life is nobody else's business. But this time he has got the poorest of poor on planet earth to pay for it. With their lives.