The Vicious Genocide You’ve Never Heard Of
Called “arguably the most serious humanitarian crisis on the
African continent,” by Roger Winter of the U.S. Agency for
International Development, a growing crisis in Sudan is quickly
becoming “the most vicious ethnic cleansing you’ve never heard of,”
as Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times states. With the
horrible memory of the Rwandan genocide haunting the world yet
again as the 10th anniversary of the 100 day long killing spree (in
which 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu women, men and children were
slaughtered) is marked almost to the day, the troubling situation
occurring presently in Sudan should have particular resonance with
the international community.
Sudan has long been torn by civil war in the southern part of
the country between the central government (made up mostly of Arabs
and Muslims) facing off the animist and Black Christian of that
area, a crisis that many are hopeful may soon be slowing, thanks to
diplomatic action by the United States and others. This new crisis,
taking place in the Darfur province in western Sudan, however, is
going beyond civil war (as horrible as that is) and stepping into
the realm of genocide.
“The current conflict began 14 months ago when two new rebel
groups emerged,” said the humanitarian organization Human Rights
Watch in a recent report. “The Sudan Liberation Movement/Army
(SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) demanded that
the Sudanese government stop arming the Arab groups in Darfur and
address longstanding grievances over underdevelopment in the
region.” The response by the government to these rebel complaints,
as the Human Rights Watch report “Darfur in Flames” said, was to
recruit and arm over 20,000 ethnically Arab militia members called
“Janjaweed” or “men on horseback” to carry out an “organized
campaign of ethnic cleansing, with villages looted and burnt down
and food and seed supplies destroyed in a ‘scorched earth’ policy,”
the BBC reported.
Human Rights Watch states that the Janjaweed and the government
that trained and backs the groups (although this is denied by the
Sudanese government officially) are attempting to exterminate the
Black population of Darfur. “It’s a campaign of murder, rape and
pillage by Sudan’s Arab ruler,” says Kristof in his New York Times
column.
United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said in
the same BBC report that his colleagues have witnessed “people
being killed, gang-raped, abused.” With a reported 800,000 forced
out of their homes already and the UN reporting 110,000 refugees in
the nearby nation of Chad, the crisis is only likely to worsen.
First, the “scorched earth” attacks have destroyed food and
livestock populations of the mainly agricultural Darfur residents,
triggering an epidemic of malnutrition and impending famine that is
slowly killing the population already driven from their homes.
Likewise, the situations in the refugee camps are causing further
suffering for the Sudanese people, due to their limited supply of
water and lack of pasturage for livestock. The incidents wherein
“the conflict has spilled into Chad… with cross-border raids that
have killed Chadian civilians,” as the UN reports, have only
worsened conditions for these already homeless, starving
refugees.
With the hideous campaign of violence, rape, kidnap, terror,
murder, starvation and displacement taking place in the country,
the international community must act to stop the Sudanese
government from supporting (or at very least failing to stop) these
atrocities.
At the time of the Rwanda genocide, “the West – specifically
Britain and the United States – conspired to ignore the clear
evidence of genocide and refused to help,” says Mark Doyle of the
BBC, and with signs of the situation in Darfur already at levels of
unbelievable tragedy, this mistake must not be repeated.
With a UN call for global action and aid for the starving
refugees, it is time for the UN to call the Sudanese government
before the UN Security Council for a multilateral demand to end
this genocide, as well as “time for Mr. Bush to speak out
forcefully against the slaughter,” as Kristof suggested.
No longer should this be allowed to be an ignored, silently
watched campaign of genocide; voices must be lifted and action must
be taken to keep this situation from becoming one of the
international communities great regrets, as the memory of Rwanda
reminds us.
Meg is a graduate student studying anthropology. Her column runs
every Thursday.
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