GLOBE EDITORIAL
Ethnic cleansing in SudanIT IS HAPPENING again. A government of murderous ideologues is committing genocide, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing while the international community either pretends not to notice or laments its own inability to stop the slaughters.
Sudan's National Islamic Front regime has waged a war of atrocities against the Christian and animist peoples of southern Sudan since 1983. Two million people have perished. Thousands of black Africans have been captured in militia raids and sold in slavery to Arab masters in the north. Now the regime in Khartoum is perpetrating massacres and ethnic cleansing in two new areas of the country. United Nations reports tell of more than 1 million people being driven from their homes in Darfur, the western region of Sudan. In Darfur, the victims of the regime, which is led by Lieutenant General Omer Bashir, are themselves Muslim, like the government-backed militias known as the janjaweed who are burning their villages, raping women, and murdering men. In a recent alert from Human Rights Watch, the executive director, Kenneth Roth, says: "These militias work in unison with government troops, with total impunity for their massive crimes." The UN emergency relief coordinator for Sudan, Jan Egeland, said Friday: "The number one humanitarian drama in the world right now is not in Iraq and not in the Palestinian territories. It is in Darfur." Human Rights Watch reported last week on separate massacres of villagers in western Sudan. In one raid, 136 men of the Fur ethnic group were "taken in army lorries to nearby valleys where they were made to kneel before being killed with a bullet in the back of the neck." In another area of Darfur, 72 men were executed in the same way. And in a third mass killing reported by Human Rights Watch, 65 men were murdered. Often Sudan's Air Force bombs the villages to be ethnically cleansed by its militia partners. And all the while, the regime in Khartoum has been maneuvering to keep international monitors from entering Darfur to witness the horrors there. Since early March the regime has opened yet another campaign of extermination, this one in the Mid-West Upper Nile region of southern Sudan known as the Shilluk Kingdom. More than 70,000 villagers have been displaced, their family members killed and their villages burned by militia groups acting for the Islamist rulers in Khartoum.
Those rulers have been putting off signing a peace accord in Kenya to end the war in southern Sudan. Incredibly, President Bush recently certified Khartoum's "good faith" in those peace talks. Instead, Bush should be rallying the rest of the world to sanction and isolate Khartoum if it does not cease its genocidal acts and permit international monitors to intercede in Sudan's killing fields. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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