Humanitarian issues
My friend sent me this article:
Dear friends,
Greetings from Albania.
This article about Darfur was sent to me through work. I thought to share it not due to its literary merit but because it is a simple, honest, and compelling truth of what is sadly occurring in the Sudan right now. The author is correct - in a post-Rwanda / Yugoslav world, the same thing is happening again and again, in more horrific and unimaginable ways. What are we doing?
- G.
World Simply Watches as Darfur Dies
Miami Herald
By John Andres Thornton
October 7, 2004
We are witnesses to genocide. A people and their way of life are being
systematically eradicated in the Darfur region of Sudan. Ethnic Africans, who live mainly pastoral lives in small villages on plains that support
little more than herding and seasonal farming, are being attacked and
slaughtered by Arab militias and the government of Sudan.
Between July 6 and Aug. 19, I went to Africa as part of a team to
investigate. I worked on a six-week project initiated and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and conducted by the nonprofit Coalition for International Justice (CIJ). CIJ assembled more than two dozen investigators from various nations, including lawyers and police investigators with experience investigating or prosecuting crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and East Timor.
Collectively, we conducted 1,137 randomly selected interviews of refugees who had crossed into Chad. What we found was extremely consistent and left little room for dispute.In a typical attack on a village, Sudanese government aircraft bomb it, and Sudanese military vehicles open fire with large-caliber machine guns. The Arab ''Janjaweed'' militias attack on horseback and camels, often killing
boys and men and raping girls and women. The villagers flee, all their
animals are stolen or killed, their food stores destroyed and their
belongings loaded into government trucks or onto the Arab militias' camels.
The villagers, fleeing burning villages, are chased by aircraft and on the ground until they cross the border into neighboring Chad or reach refugee camps inside Sudan. Within this pattern are variations in the level of horror and violence: mass executions, gang rapes, burning babies alive,mutilation and depravity beyond imagination.
Hundreds of villages and towns have been destroyed. The United Nations estimates that 1.2 million people have been displaced. An estimated 50,000 have died. Even if they escape, the refugees are still at grave risk. Many of the camps in Chad lie in an arid no man's land plagued by flash floods from seasonal rains. Refugees in Sudan face an additional peril -- ongoing attacks in and outside the camps. A recent World Health Organization report states that between 6,000 and 10,000 people are dying from disease and violence each month in Sudan as the flash floods and attacks hinder U.N. efforts to respond.
Every U.S. official who has looked into what is happening, from Senate
Majority Leader Bill Frist to Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel to
Secretary of State Colin Powell, is genuinely outraged by the carnage.
Congress unanimously declared it genocide, as did the Bush administration.But prodding the United Nations to act has been slow going. On July 30,months after U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan recognized the growing crisis, the Security Council passed a U.S.-sponsored resolution giving Sudan 30 days to disarm Arab militias attacking black Africans.Sudan failed to do so. As a result of pressure from the United States and others, the Security Council passed a second resolution on Sept. 18 threatening sanctions against Sudan's oil industry if its government fails to end the violence, as well as providing for a commission of inquiry to investigate reports of human-rights violations and to determine "whether or not acts of genocide have occurred.''
There should be no waiting for the commission's conclusion. By now, the world must know what is going on. Foot-dragging by some nations to protect oil interests, maintaining that Muslim-on-Muslim conflict is not the business of outsiders or simply opposing American leadership on the issue are unconscionable. The motivations of those nations opposing legitimate efforts to protect innocent civilians must be exposed. If the world does nothing for the people of Darfur, the message is that we learned nothing from the Holocaust and the killing fields of Cambodia and Rwanda.
John Andres Thornton is lawyer based in Miami.