Government sponsored genocide has
now been ongoing for decades and it appears that as one region is cleared out
another is then targeted. We can understand
the attack on Christian tribesmen but the larger target is most likely more
tribal and animist.
That the Southern
Sudan has been forced to split of as a separate nation at least
provides a safe haven for the inevitable refugees or at least some of them.
One also wishes the US would treat
the present game of outright denial by the Sudanese with a completely denied
carpet bombing of the Sudanese military assets.
It really is that outrageous and it is obvious that decades of
negotiations have barely slowed the genocide at all.
Our problem is that we rally do
not want to go in there at all. Yugoslavia was
difficult and we had allies on the ground with NATO. It still took intervention to end the horror.
The lesson of course is that it
is going to take outright intervention on the ground to stop Sudan . African nations are now becoming more
effective and can act as creditable allies although south Sudan has not had time to fully organize
a working military and their presence is necessary.
In the meantime the horror will continue
for another decade.
Sudan’s Recurring Nightmare
Along with the citizens of what is now the new nation of the Republic
of South Sudan, the people of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State were for
decades mercilessly persecuted and slaughtered by their own government.
Starvation and enslavement were used as weapons of war along with ground combat
and aerial bombardment. The hallmark of Khartoum ’s multiple declarations of jihad against
its own people is the deliberate targeting of civilians and particularly of
Christians. In the case of Blue
Nile State ,
one Sudanese military commander,Taib Musba, was
responsible for the killing of 15,000 Uduk Christians in the mid 1980’s. Some
he killed personally by driving three-inch-long nails into the tops of their
heads. Others were crushed by a 50 ton Soviet-made tank.
Deliberate targeting of civilians is also the hallmark of Khartoum ’s current offensive against the Nuba
Mountains and Blue
Nile State. Since June 5, 2011, the Islamist regime’s forces, aided by
militias, have been conducting an
ethnically-based extermination campaign in the Nuba
Mountains of South Kordofan State
while attempting to crush the resistance movement of the Sudan People’s
Liberation Movement-North (SPLM/N). And in September they began attacking Blue Nile State , as well.
In June Islamist militias first conducted a door to door search looking
for Nuba with orders from ICC-indicted war criminal President Omer al-Bashir to
“sweep out the trash,” and whenever they find a Nuba to “clean it up.” The
horrific “cleaning” has been verified by the Satellite Sentinel Project. This
invaluable effort, started by actor George
Clooney, has provided evidence of mass graves believed to be of some 7000
people that were rounded up at the UN compound in the capital city of Kadugli by Sudanese
government collaborators and massacred. Since June, regular aerial bombardment
has killed many and sent hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in caves and
beyond in South Sudan .
To add to the nightmare, Khartoum began
attacking Blue
Nile State inSeptember.
Unknown numbers of men, women, and children have been killed and tens of
thousands have been displaced, even as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North
(SPLA/N), the resistance movement’s forces, fight to protect the people and
maintain territory. The people of Blue Nile
and the Nuba now face starvation in government-orchestrated famine. Khartoum has banned all
humanitarian assistance from the regions. Now Sudan ’s
rainy season has ended and Khartoum
is resuming land attacks, moving mechanized infantry columns into place, in
addition to aerial bombardment.
On November 3, Khartoum announced the
capture of Kurmuk, the capital of Southern Blue Nile State, by Government of Sudan
(GOS) forces. These forces include both the regular Sudanese army and
Mujahedeen and Janjaweed transferred from slaughtering civilians in Darfur
civilians to slaughtering civilians in Blue Nile State .
According to Blue Nile Association North America, “before entering Kurmuk the
GOS forces used aerial bombardment, heavy artillery and helicopter gunships
targeting the city of Kurmuk
and the surrounding areas, destroying water storage tanks, churches, schools
and civilians’ homes.” Tens of thousands of indigenous people were displaced,
injured, and killed. Khartoum
may also have employed chemical
weapons. Many of the injured SPLA/N soldiers “had strange bleeding from
their ears and noses.”
Reports on the ground confirmed that all of the villages and towns in
the 100 or so miles between Damazin city and Kurmuk as far as the Ethiopian
border were completely looted, burned and destroyed by the invading forces. The
Blue Nile Association stated that ICC-indicted war criminal president Omer
al-Bashir had declared following the secession of South
Sudan that there was “no
room for any talk about diversity.” He announced that Sudan was now a
“pure
Arab Islamic State.” “It seems that after this campaign and the campaign in
South Kordofan President Basher [sic] is following his words to
eradicate and cleanse the indigenous people in Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains
of South Kurdufan,” the Blue Nile Association
declared.
Not content to bomb men, women, and children in their own home regions,
Sudanese Russian-built Antonovs recently crossed international borders and dropped bombs in the
new nation of South Sudan where many people
from the north had fled. On Thursday, November 10, Sudanese bombers attacked South
Sudan’s Unity State ’s Yida refugee camp, run by
the Christian aid organizationSamaritan’s
Purse. And the day before, the Sudanese had bombed Upper
Nile State, also in South Sudan .
At least 20,000 people had sought refuge at Yida, just over the border
from Sudan .
The refugee camp was hit by four bombs, three of which detonated, causing
extensive property damage. Thankfully, no persons were injured. The one bomb
that did not detonate could have been the source of greatest tragedy. It landed
wedged into the side of one of the huts used as a school building, filled with
some 200 children. But the commissioner of Pariang
County , Unity State ,
reported 12 people killed and 20 wounded in the area. The aerial attack on Upper Nile
State was reported to
have killed 7 people in the area of Guffa. Church sources there said that the
bombing was “serious and deliberate.”
With the kind of nerve for which it has long been infamous, the
Sudanese regimedenied the entire episode. “This information is completely
false. We didn’t bomb any camps or any areas inside the borders of South
Sudan,” Sudan
Armed Forces spokesman Sawarmi Khaled Saad told the AFP news
agency. “What is going on in South Sudan
belongs to the southerners. We don’t have any links to this,” he declared. The
Sudanese Ambassador to the UN, Daffa-Alla Elhag Ali Osman, similarly denied the
charges, saying that
the reports were “fabrications” and “there was no aerial bombardment.”
Meanwhile, the response of the Obama administration has been more of
the same moral equivalency that has enabled Khartoum to continue on toward its final
solution, an ethnically-cleansed Arab Islamist state, for years. On November 9,
after the aerial attack on Upper Nile State ,
the State Department issued astatement condemning
“in the strongest possible terms the aerial bombardment by the Sudan Armed Forces that occurred near the
international border between Sudan
and South Sudan .”
After saying that “indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilian
targets always is unacceptable and unjustified” the State Department states the
obvious: “This attack only further emphasizes the need for an immediate halt to
indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas by the Sudan Armed Forces…” The statement
warns that this also further emphasizes the need for “resolution to the
conflict through a resumption of political talks between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation
Movement-Northern Sector.” It concludes by urging “both sides to fully commit”
to African Union talks “facilitated by Thabo
Mbeki.”
Apart from the doubt that many Sudanese have expressed concerning the
former president of South Africa ’s
neutrality (since he himself owns a business in Khartoum ), the idea proposed by the State
Department that there can be a political solution to the conflict is absurd
when the conflict is jihad. The oft-stated goal of Khartoum ’s jihad is a pure Arab Islamist
state. The majority of the Sudanese people do not want this Islamic utopia.
They want freedom, democracy, and separation of church/mosque and state, and
they have fought harder and sacrificed more for more years for it than any
denizen of “Arab Spring.”
“We know very well the plans of the Khartoum regime, which is working
on a strategy of demographic change and replacement of indigenous people with
foreigners from Somalia and Niger,” said SPLM/N spokesman Arno Ngutulu in a
November 11 press release. “We are more determined than ever to continue the
struggle until the toppling of the regime and eliminate it from the roots
completely,” the statement concluded. In this recurring nightmare in which
those who want freedom and democracy in Sudan have to struggle against not only
the Islamist regime in Khartoum, but must fight an uphill battle with the
United Nations and even with the U.S. government, that “toppling” will not come
easy.
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