GENOCIDE FLOURISHES WHILE MEDIA NEGLECTS DARFUR

On April 8, 2009, it was reported that General Scott Gration, the US Special Envoy to Sudan, proposed a resolution to fill the gap left by the Government of Sudan's decision to expel 16 aid groups from Darfur. The purpose of this blog is to provide updates on how Darfuri lives are affected as they wait for aid to be restored.

Updates and comments about the crisis are provided by Mohamed Suleiman, a US-based Darfuri with a broad network of Darfuri contacts from the Diaspora and from IDP camps in Sudan and refugee camps in Chad. For additional information, visit www.whilewewaitsudan.org/

Day 551 was November 12th 2010

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Monday, December 27, 2010

Khor Abeche, a disaster in the making

By Mohamed Suleiman

Source: www.whilewewaitsudan.org/2010/12/day-551-november-12th-2010

While the world celebrates the holidays, Government of Sudan (GoS) has picked the right timing to turn Khor Abeche into a Srebrenica, not the Serbian style but Kahrtoum style: slow death through blockade and starvation.

Since December 10th 2010 (more than 2 weeks ago), GoS did not allow any vehicle to enter the town. The only western NGO, World vision, left Khor Abeche when areal bombings started on the 10th. No humanitarian aid (food, medicine, other life essentials) was allowed in. Trucks from Nyala that were sent by the relatives of the town residents desperately trying to help the trapped people in and around Khor Abbechi, were turned back by GoS troops and Janjaweed forces lead by Musa Galis.

I am in contact with some residents of the town of Khor Abbechi and some of their sons in Europe, and this what they told me:

- Khor Abeche is a town in South Darfur. It is about 55 miles north-east of Nyala (capital city of South Darfur). The town is inhabited now with about 11 thousand people.

- Musa Galis, a retired Police General who is now the Nazir (head of a tribe) of the Birgid tribe, said publicly in October 2010 that he odes not want certain tribes in the area. He specifically singled out a large population of the Zaghawa tribe (one of the tribes targeted by GoS in its campaign of ethnic cleansing). Musa Galis mentioned that he has the backing of GoS and " the Ababil jets are ready". Ababil is the biblical name the GoS uses to describe its air force power. (Ababil means the birds that drop fatal stones).

Musa Galis was promised by the GoS that he will be in charge of the area, including Khor Abeche, if he droves away the other tribes considered "enemy of the State".

- On December 10th and 11th of this month, government's jets, antonoves, and helicopters bombed Khor Abeche. Targets included anything that sustains the life of the local people: water sources, food storage huts, livestock, and the market. On the 12th and the following days, Musa Galis and his militia entered the the town marked looting and destroying crops and goods. The town just finished harvest after the farming season. Eyewitness said the destruction was deliberate. Many huts contain harvest of peanuts, sesame, and sorghum, were set on fire.
On Friday 17 and Friday 24th, more areal bombings were carried out by Ababils.

- About 1500 of the town residents sought refuge in UNAMID local post. More than 2500 fled to to Wadi Hariza (dry river) and some tried to escape the bombings by fleeing to the Mountain.

- Musa Galis is sending the messages to those who remained in the town (about 7000), that he will not harm them if they seek refuge in the IDP camps or any other place but not to remain in Khor Abeche. When the people refused to leave, his now message is: if Ababils do not force you out, hunger will.

DON'T FORGET DARFUR IN 2011 ~ GENOCIDE and HUMANITY ~ 8 LETTER WORDS

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I made this video a year ago and posted it on January 1, 2010. And this year, today, Darfur has been - and is - neglected as a humanity-story - a government killing its own people and we call ourselves "human".

Genocide and Humanity - 8 letter words

"There is no problem we cannot solve, there is no destiny that we cannot fulfill. We will restore our moral standing in the world..." Barack Obama "NEVER AGAIN" just doesn't mean a thing.

Genocide in our time is
worthy of being noticed,
worthy of being reported by our media,
worthy of having the leaders
of free nations use their political will
...to end the Darfur genocide
and put some meaning to the words
"Never Again"
. . . words we love to use
at the languishing end of each genocide
that this planet has hosted.

Click image to enlarge

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Air strike in Darfur kills 10, including 5 children

Source: Radio Dabanga

Date: 28 Dec 2010

KHAZAN JADEED (28 Dec .) - A government aircraft on Sunday conducted an air raid in Darfur that killed 10 people, including at least five children, and wounded many more. The attack occurred in the area of Abu Deimat, south of Khazan Jadeed in South Darfur. A witness told Radio Dabanga that the raid took place at 02:00 a.m. in the morning. Among the dead was the farmer Hamada Abdelrahman Dualbeit, 30 years of old, and with his wife and his three sons and Muriam Ismail Abakr, student at the University of Nyala, in addition to her son, and Nasreddin Ahmed Bushara, and his wife and baby.

Government troops rape 2 girls in Darfur camp, terrorize refugees

Source: Radio Dabanga

Date: 28 Dec 2010

TAWILA (28 Dec .) - Government forces stationed in the area of Rwanda camp in Tawila in North Darfur raped two girls, 15 and 19 years old.

Government forces stationed in the area of Rwanda camp in Tawila in North Darfur raped two girls, 15 and 19 years old. A witness said that the forces entered Rwanda camp on Saturday, firing heavily in the air, then began breaking into shops and looting. They wounded someone in the leg with gunfire and also killed a donkey. The witness said that the displaced heard there were 200 vehicles coming from Kebkabiya to the area and they fled for protection to UNAMID camp.

SUDAN TARGET OF LIVE SATELLITE STARTING DECEMBER 30, 2010

Click post title for Radio Dabanga news regarding Darfur - the neglected story of genocide

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Clooney's "Anti-Genocide Paparazzi": Watching Sudan From Above

By MARK BENJAMIN Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2010

George Clooney visits Sudan to draw attention to the dangers that could result should southern Sudan vote to separate from the north.

Tim Freccia / Enough Project

George Clooney and John Prendergast slumped down at a wooden table in a dusty school compound in southern Sudan. It was Oct. 4, and the two men were in the hometown of Valentino Achak Deng, whose experiences wandering the desert as a refugee during Sudan's last civil war were the basis for the best-selling book What Is the What.

Clooney, the actor, and Prendergast, a human-rights activist with 25 years of experience in Africa, had heard enough on their seven-day visit to know that a new round of atrocities could follow the January referendum on independence. If it did, the likelihood was that no one would be held accountable. Why not, Clooney asked, "work out some sort of a deal to spin a satellite" above southern Sudan and let the world watch to see what happens? (See photos of Clooney in Sudan.)

Three months later, Clooney's idea is about to go live. Starting Dec. 30, the Satellite Sentinel Project — a joint experiment by the U.N.'s Operational Satellite Applications Programme, Harvard University, the Enough Project and Clooney's posse of Hollywood funders — will hire private satellites to monitor troop movements starting with the oil-rich region of Abyei. The images will be analyzed and made public at www.satsentinel.org (which goes live on Dec. 29) within 24 hours of an event to remind the leaders of northern and southern Sudan that they are being watched. "We are the antigenocide paparazzi," Clooney tells TIME. "We want them to enjoy the level of celebrity attention that I usually get. If you know your actions are going to be covered, you tend to behave much differently than when you operate in a vacuum."

You don't have to be a spook to have an eye in the sky anymore. Private firms with names like GeoEye, DigitalGlobe and ImageSat International have a half-dozen "birds" circling the globe every 90 minutes in low-Earth orbit, about 297 miles (478 km) up. The best images from these satellites display about 8 sq. in. (50 sq. cm) of the ground in each pixel on a computer screen. That is not enough granularity to read a car's license plate or ID a person, but analysts can tell the difference between cars and trucks and track the movements of troops or horses. "It is Google Earth on lots of steroids," says Lars Bromley, a top U.N. imagery analyst. (See pictures of Southern Sudan preparing for nationhood.)

But you need money for it. A hurry-up order of what Bromley calls a "single shot" from a satellite covers an area of about 105 sq. mi. (272 sq. km) and costs $10,000. A rush job on a "full strip" image of land roughly 70 miles (115 km) long and 9 miles (14 km) wide could run nearly $70,000. Sentinel is launching with $750,000 in seed money from Not On Our Watch, the human rights organization Clooney founded along with Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, David Pressman and Jerry Weintraub. Clooney predicted he won't have much trouble raising more money once the project goes live. (See the top 10 world news stories of 2010.)

Prendergast's group, the Enough Project, is the human-rights arm of the liberal Center for American Progress; it recruited Bromley's team at the U.N. and brought in analysts from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative to pore over the images as they arrive. "Generally, what we have done in the past is an after-the-fact documentation exercise," Bromley explains. "This is proactive, wide-area monitoring," he says.

Clooney, who has made four trips to Sudan since 2006, believes Sentinel might have applications in other global hot spots. "This is as if this were 1943 and we had a camera inside Auschwitz and we said, 'O.K., if you guys don't want to do anything about it, that's one thing,'" Clooney says. "But you can't say you did not know."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2039887,00.html#ixzz19RMuN0w4