The USA media barely mentions, if at all, the genocide, now in its 6th year.
GENOCIDE STOPS WITH US
Darfur: Eyewitnesses on film implicated Sudanese Minister in war crimes ahead of ICC report of UN
4 June 08 – In a 17-minute film released today by the Aegis Trust with the support of Open Society Justice Initiative and Human Rights First, and circulated to UN diplomats on the eve of the ICC’s six-monthly report to the UN Security Council, survivors from villages attacked by Sudanese Government forces and Janjaweed militia in West Darfur directly implicate the two men indicted by the ICC on 51 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur: Ali Kushayb, a leader of the Janjaweed, and Ahmad Harun, Sudan’s current Humanitarian Affairs Minister.
Interviewed by the Aegis Trust several weeks ago and speaking for the first time on film, survivors from locations including Mukjar, Bindisi and Kodoom – three of the four villages referenced in the ICC indictment – describe Harun, who was then one of Sudan’s interior ministers, providing orders, weapons and money for the Janjaweed. To protect their identity, their names are withheld and in the film, their faces are blurred out.
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28 dead, dozens missing in Sudan plane inferno
KHARTOUM (AFP) — At least 28 people died when a passenger jet caught fire after landing at Khartoum airport, officials said on Wednesday, with dozens more still missing as authorities probed the cause of the accident. Full article: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5itJfj6eOosylUw_jUhVx7kAmpOoQ
When the link to the above article came in an email yesterday, I read it with interest because of my activism regarding the five-plus-year genocide in Darfur, Sudan.
And with the email was this text:
This is a terrible tragedy... But how on Earth can a tragic accident that killed about 100 people over Khartoum be worth more headlines than an intentional death campaign of 400,000 by the government operating out of Khartoum? The Sudanese government will likely say that the plane would have been in better shape were it not for US sanctions. Perhaps our news articles should be quoting why that the reason US sanctions are in place in the first place is because the Sudanese government is in essence one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organizations with a death score card that makes Al Qaeda for all of its horrors look like Little League Killers. End of email text.
For all of our concern in the USA about terrorism directed toward us, it would make sense to call the perpetrators of this genocide and the leader of this genocide, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir - terrorists. But the reporting of the Sudanese' government committing genocide on its own people is so under-reported, that many people still don't know it is happening. It is happening. And the world has shown no will to stop it. Some people are considered dispensable.
There were two and a half million dead in the last two Sudan genocides
and now a third is on the way
by Nat Hentoff
June 10th, 2008 12:00 AM
www.villagevoice.comYears before Sudan's General Omar al-Bashir began the genocide in Darfur, I was reporting on another genocide—also conducted by al-Bashir, the Sudanese army, and his vicious Arab Janjaweed militia—in the south of Sudan. While his later victims in Darfur were black African Muslims, the corpses in the oil-rich south were black Christians and animists. General al-Bashir is an equal-opportunity destroyer.
By June 2002—in the 17th year of that first genocide—I was citing a much-belated report by an American-led commission (with members from Britain, Italy, France, and Norway) about how the Janjaweed were still being sent south to "burn villages, loot cattle, rape and kill civilians, and abduct and enslave men, women, and children." The slaves were then herded north to continue their bondage.
In October 2002, George W. Bush signed into law the Sudan Peace Act—passed unanimously in the Senate and overwhelmingly in the House— which declared that "the acts of the government of Sudan constitute genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide."
General al-Bashir was not impressed. In May 2003, a Christian group, Servant's Heart, with four medical centers and schools in southern Sudan, reported that the Sudanese armed forces attacked 10 villages in a nighttime assault: "Many of those killed were burned to death in their homes as they hid. Ten children and women were abducted" to be sent north into slavery.
At last, in January 2005, al-Bashir seemed to yield to international pressure, signing a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) with the south's outgunned rebel armed forces, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM). The SPLM became the ruling party in the south, and al-Bashir's National Congress Party (NCP) ruled the north. The south was given semi-autonomous status and, by 2011, would be able to vote on whether it preferred to become independent or remain under the Khartoum government in the north.
Of particular interest to al-Bashir was the town of Abyei, adjacent to the rich oil fields that account for almost half of Sudan's daily production of 500,000 barrels of oil. The purported peace treaty soon began to unravel—violently—this May when al-Bashir's government soldiers and Janjaweed turned Abyei into ruins.
On May 26, The Washington Post reported: "Sudanese government officials blame southern forces for the destruction, but southern officials, U.N. officials, witnesses and people who fled say it was a systematic campaign by the Sudanese government to depopulate the oil-rich area and take it by force."
Roger Winter—the former U.S. State Department special representative on Sudan and, before that, the head of the Agency for International Development's humanitarian bureau—says he was in Abyei on May 16 and 17. He adds: "The perpetrators were the men of the Sudan Armed Forces 31st Brigade that has been operating illegally in the area for months, terrorizing and displacing civilians—at least 106,000 of them."
In the illusory 2005 peace agreement, there was a special Abyei Protocol on the sphere of authority in that area—which, Winter adds, "was written by the United States, which then basically disappeared on Abyei. The U.S. is culpable for having created the environment in which Khartoum realistically believed it could act on Abyei without consequence."
What the hell! After all, al-Bashir has ignored, broken, or obstructed numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions throughout these many years. He feels he has nothing to fear from the U.N. or the U.S.
The first reports from the clashes in Abyei indicated that at least 22 people had been killed, and thousands more torn from their homes. But although both al-Bashir's forces (in which the Janjaweed militia has increasingly been hidden and put into uniform) and the SPLM have since pulled back from Abyei, officials on both sides agree on one point, according to The Washington Post on May 26: "Perhaps the most dreaded scenario . . . is beginning to unfold—a resumption of the north-south civil war, which killed an estimated 2 million people, making it one of the deadliest conflicts since World War II."
When I asked Winter if he believes the north-south war has actually begun, he confessed that he does see the return of those horrors: "Bashir's government has produced one of the largest civilian body counts since the Holocaust"—referring to the two million killed in the north-south war, as well as the half-million or so killed thus far in the Darfur genocide.
Soon after becoming president, George W. Bush—reading a report on how President Bill Clinton and the U.N. deliberately avoided intervening in the Rwandan genocide—wrote a pledge on a page of that report: "Not on my watch." Later, he was the first world leader to publicly call al-Bashir's holocaust in Darfur a "genocide."
On May 28, IRIN (a United Nations news service) quoted Ashraf Qazi, the special representative in Sudan for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, as saying that the inability of thousands of people to return home after the devastation in Abyei "could lead to political instability" throughout the Sudan—and then in adjoining regions.
The Sudanese People's Liberation Movement is not composed of pacifists. Its secretary general, Pagan Amum, says of the 31st Brigade's attack on Abyei: "This is a clear indication that he [al-Bashir] may be thinking of 'a final solution' to the Abyei problem by killing the people and displacing them."
Another SPLM official, Musa Malei adds: "We are not desiring to go to war— we have been forced to fight."
But once that "final solution," conducted by many more forces than al-Bashir's 31st Brigade, obliterates Abyei and its people, who would stop him from finishing up the job in Darfur—and then neighboring Chad?
Read the full article: www.villagevoice.com
GENOCIDE STOPS WITH US
If you live in the USA - Call 1-800-GENOCIDE
Take a Stand:
http://savedarfur.org/page/content/china
Spotlight on the Sponsors - Jun 20 Day of Action
The corporate sponsors of the 2008 Olympic Games - some of the most recognizable brands in the world - have unique leverage over China. Yet, they have refused to use this leverage to convince China to help end the Darfur genocide.
Join us and our partners, Dream for Darfur, as we protest the sponsors' silence and urge them to help bring security to Darfur.
Download the demonstration toolkit (PDF)
Download PDF profiles of the targeted companies:
Find a sponsor location near you (PDF)
For background, read the Report Card that triggered these protests.
Labels: Bush, Darfur, Genocide, Genocide is Ignored By The World, ilovemylife, Omar al-Bashir is a terrorist, Sandra Hammel, Sudan, Where is the Media, Where is the Outrage
