“Genocide is underway in Darfur, Sudan. Already 50,000 African Muslims have been killed and 1.2 million displaced by the Sudanese Government militias and encouraged by Khartoum…We cannot, in good conscience, stand by and let this genocide continue.”
- Senator Barack Obama, 2004.
“The United States has a moral obligation anytime you see humanitarian catastrophes. When you see a genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia or in Darfur, that is a stain on all of us, that’s a stain on our souls…We can’t say ‘never again’ and then allow it to happen again, and as a president of the United States I don’t intend to abandon people or turn a blind eye to slaughter.”
- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, 2007.
“The Government of Sudan has pursued a policy of genocide in Darfur. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children have been killed in Darfur, and the killing continues to this very day…The Bush Administration and Congress have imposed sanctions in an effort to change Khartoum’s behaviour; to suddenly offer to normalize relations before that change takes place, particularly without close consultation with Congress, makes no sense.Washington must respond to the ongoing genocide and the ongoing failure to implement the CPA with consistency and strong consequences.
- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, 2008.
“The genocide in Darfur has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and left millions more displaced…Our conscience and our interests in peace and security call upon the United States and the international community to act with a sense of urgency and purpose.”
- President Barack Obama, 2009.
Oh, what a difference winning an election can make! As a Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama described Darfur, a rebellious region in Sudan, as one of his top priorities, gaining support from voters by doing so. But in contrast, in the 2012 electoral contest, the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfurhas so far barely rated a mention. And it is easy to understand why.
Despite Obama’s stirring, call-to-arms verbiage in 2008, the slaughter still continues in Darfur, about which he promised he would “not turn a blind eye” as president. The most recent instance of murder by Sudanese government forces of indicted International Criminal Court (ICC) fugitive President Omar al-Bashir concerns the killing of 12 demonstrators last Tuesday in Nyala, the capital ofSouth Darfur State. Since Obama’s election, government attacks against Darfuri civilians have resulted in additional hundreds of deaths, thousands of refugees and the destruction of homes and villages as well as the continued use of rape as a weapon of war.
The situation also has not changed for the three million Darfuri civilians displaced by the conflict that began in 2003 between the government and Darfuri rebel forces over black African Dafur’s marginalisation and discrimination by the central Arab government in Khartoum. These homeless Darfuris are still living in refugee camps both in Darfur and neighbouring Chad, to which they fled to escape death from air raids and from the brutal, government-armed Arab horse militias, the dreaded janjaweeds. Murder, rape and the destruction of villages was the janjaweed’s specialty – and still is. From the refugee camps, the Darfuris have also had to look on helplessly as their lands were taken over by Arab colonists, while the Obama administration looked the other way and complained about Israeli settlements on the West Bank.
And instead of getting quieter with an American president who stated several times he was adamantly opposed to such killing and Rwanda-like slaughter, the sounds of genocide in Sudan just keep getting louder. The Khartoum government is again engaged in genocide, its third one to date, in the Nuba Mountains inSouth Kordofan state.
Before Darfur and South Kordofan, the first Khartoum-backed genocide occurred in southern Sudan, now the country of South Sudan, between 1983 and 2005, a conflict in which two million people, mostly black African southern Sudanese, died, four million were displaced and tens of thousands captured and sent to Arab northern Sudan as slaves. One of them, Francis Bok, a Dinka tribesman, told his story here in FrontPage Magazine of his ten years working as a child slave, from age seven to seventeen, for a cruel Arab master and his escape to freedom in America.
In South Kordofan, it is again, like in Darfur and in the former southern Sudan, a black African population that is being savagely attacked. Reports indicate the Sudanese military is waging a campaign of extermination there along with a military one. Like in Darfur, government warplanes are bombing Nuba villages unopposed, while witnesses state government troops “were shooting ‘the black people’.”
“Nuba were often just shot on sight by Khartoum forces, no questions asked,”testified former State Department Special Representative on Sudan, Roger Winter, before a congressional hearing. “Today, again, Nuba are positioned for liquidation by Khartoum forces.”
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