Captain Brian Steidle, a former U.S. Marine, who spent the past six months as a monitor in Darfur, has been getting a dire message out before media outlets and international organizations.
These two orphans from Darfur fled to the northern part of the Chad/Sudan border after their parents, uncle and older brother were either killed or went missing in an attack by the Janjaweed militia on their village, Ab-Layha. Nijah Ahmed, 4, is carrying her little brother, Nibraz, who is 13 months old and malnourished. Because so many men were killed and so many young women were carried off to be raped and killed, there are dozens of orphans in the area. - Nicholas Kristof, New York Times.
I've heard Steidle interviewed on several radio programs. He is a serious and credible voice, and he is telling
a dark tale of evil in the Sudan.
[Steidle] described how African Union (AU) troops could only stand and watch as scenes of carnage unfolded in front of them. He said he had personally witnessed Sudanese government gunships strafing villages, setting them alight, and found the bodies of torture victims with ears cut off and eyes plucked out.
And he warned that, with the security situation deteriorating and aid agencies unable to reach large parts of the region, the death toll from illness and disease - currently running at about 10,000 people a month - was likely to rise by as much as 50 per cent to 15,000 a month.
Did you believe things had quieted down, as less critical stories like Schiavo and Michael Jackson were dominating the air waves and front pages?
Capt Steidle said he had seen the Sudanese government's Antonov planes make bombing runs over the villages. And he added his team had gathered evidence of a concerted campaign of rape waged against the women in the black African villages by the mainly Arab militias. "In every village we came to there were women who had been raped. They told us that the men who did it had said it was so that they would have a lighter-skinned child."
Capt Steidle said AU missions were accompanied by representatives from the rebels and the Sudanese government. "They would each downplay what their role was," he said. "Most of the time the government officials didn't have much to say. They would make excuses and say that the helicopters hadn't fired, even though we would find shrapnel on the ground."
He said they had filed dozens of reports on the incidents they witnessed, which were meant to be passed to donor governments involved in the mission, but he was not aware whether any of the reports had been received.
According to Capt Steidle, the attacks are still continuing, placing the lives of many more people at risk. With many villages cleared and very few crops grown or harvested in the last year, malnutrition is a growing problem and the rainy season is again likely to increase disease.
But there is some good news. The United States relented on the matter of sending 51 Sudanese war criminals to the International Criminal Court, after threatening to veto the UN Security Council action based on its objections to the Court.
The "fundamental objections" of the United States to the court remain, spokesman Richard Boucher said. Dropping a veto threat, the administration abstained this week on a U.N. Security Council resolution that allows ICC prosecution of war crimes perpetrators in Sudan's Darfur region.
* 'Extraordinary circumstances': Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suggested that a show of U.S. flexibility in the deliberations was necessary because of the "extraordinary circumstance" posed by the continuing humanitarian nightmare in Sudan.
"There are clearly crimes against humanity being committed in Sudan, and there are people who have to be held accountable for those crimes," Rice said.
Given the high priority the United States has given to holding Sudanese war criminals accountable, a veto would have caused embarrassment to the administration. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said in September the abuses in Sudan qualify as genocide.
So take time out from your daily rants to remember the evil the world needs to confront right now in Darfur.
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