Ten years after the Rwanda genocide, another one is happening in the Darfur region of western Sudan. And just as it did nothing for Rwanda, the world seems ready to do nothing, again.
Human Rights' Watch
report speaks for itself:
...In many cases the severity of the crimes committed by government forces and allied militia as well as the widespread and systematic way in which these abuses are carried out amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
...Attacks on civilians have increased in scale, number, and brutality and have been conducted on villages and towns in the absence of rebel presence or military targets. Civilians sharing the ethnicity of the rebel movement...have become the main targets of government military offensives aimed at destroying any real or perceived support base of the rebel forces. Government forces and janjaweed militias have inflicted a campaign of forcible displacement, murder, pillage, and rape on hundreds of thousands of civilians over the past fourteen months.
Dozens of refugees interviewed by Human Rights Watch and others have described repeated attacks on their villages and towns. Hundreds and hundreds of villages have been destroyed, usually burned, with all property looted. Key village assets, such as water points and mills, have been destroyed in an apparent effort to render the villages uninhabitable. Numerous civilians have been killed and injured by aerial bombardment and militia raids. Hundreds of women have reportedly been raped by militia and government troops. Children have been abducted in large numbers. Once they fled their homes, thousands of civilians have been subjected to systematic attacks, looting, and violence by militias in government-controlled towns and at janjaweed checkpoints that dot the roads...
The evidence from Darfur points to a systematic campaign by government forces and allied militias to violently force rural civilians from their homes and render them destitute and corralled in government towns and camps.
We need to make the public more aware of this horror. Write letters to the editor of newspapers, call talk radio shows, mention this in your blog if you have one.
Both the World Food Programme and Doctors Without Borders are trying to deliver food aid to the displaced civilians (with mixed success, as government troops are blocking many food convoys). Donations to either of these two would be of great help.
Remember Rwanda. Never again!