As reported in the Washington Post, the Government of Sudan was reelected to the United Nations Human Rights Commission on May 4. Three days later, Human Rights Watch released a lengthy report documenting sponsorship of and participation in genocide by the government of Sudan. The report provides a snapshot of the systematic efforts of the ethnic-Arab government to eliminate ethnic-African Christians, animists and Muslims from southern regions of the country.
According to the report, an historic conflict was reignited, “… in February 2003, when two rebel groups… demanded an end to chronic economic marginalization and sought power-sharing within the Arab-ruled Sudanese state. They also sought government action to end the abuses of their rivals, Arab pastoralists who were driven onto African farmlands by drought and desertification—and who had a nomadic tradition of armed militias.”
The report continues, “The government has responded to this armed and political threat by targeting the civilian populations from which the rebels were drawn. It brazenly engaged in ethnic manipulation by organizing a military and political partnership with some Arab nomads comprising the Janjaweed; armed, trained, and organized them; and provided effective impunity for all crimes committed.” (Details of the atrocities can be read here).
The Sudanese government and the Janjaweed militia use murder, rape, pillaging and destruction to accomplish the removal of an unwanted ethnic rival. The reports states that, “With rare exceptions, the countryside is now emptied of its original Masalit and Fur inhabitants. Everything that can sustain and succour life – livestock, food stores, wells and pumps, blankets and clothing – has been looted or destroyed. Villages have been torched not randomly, but systematically – often not once, but twice
The report characterizes the response from the international community as having been, “slow to exert all possible pressure on the Sudanese government to reverse the ethnic cleansing and end the associated crimes against humanity it has carried out.” The world has known for years about the brutal campaign by Sudanese Arabs against black Africans, just as it has known for years about the enslavement by Sudanese Muslims of Christians and animists. To call their response "slow" is to give the international community credit it does not deserve. The United Nations and it's collective members have been more active in opposing the liberation of Iraq than they have been in supporting the liberation of black, Christian and animist Sudanese.
Who is more depraved, the Arab Muslims who terrorize Sudan, or the elitists in the U.N. who protect and coddle them?
Posted by publius at May 24, 2004 10:21 PM