Sudan: "Darfur's ongoing agony is the world's shame" by Emma Bonino and William Shawcross 4:41pm 29th May, 2004   1 June 2004 ( Published by The Daily Star).    "There are no more villages to burn," a United Nations relief officer said when describing the situation in western Sudan last week. Forced displacement of people had stopped to an extent, he added, and after more than a year of war, an unsettling calm had fallen across much of the region of Darfur.    But just because Darfur's villages have been razed to the ground, that does not mean the horror is over for the brutalized civilians of the area. The Janjaweed government-backed Arab militia continues its campaign of mass murder and rape against black African tribes in Darfur. The government of Sudan not only assists the Janjaweed with money and guns, it also supports the fighters tactically with aerial bombardment of villages immediately before militia raids.    The Janjaweed have corralled civilians into camps - what some rightly call "concentration camps" - where many are dying slowly from disease and malnutrition. This year's planting season has been missed, grain reserves have been deliberately targeted and destroyed, and the government continues to block humanitarian aid from reaching most displaced Darfurians. Those who were not slaughtered outright are clearly being left to starve. Since early last year, this vicious campaign has claimed an estimated 30,000 civilian lives; international aid agencies say that over 1.2 million people have been displaced within Sudan and at least 120,000 have fled to neighboring Chad, making Khartoum's conduct a grave threat to regional as well as internal stability. USAID estimates that another 350,000 could die due to the desperate situation in Darfur.    In short, the government of Sudan is conducting a scorched-earth, near-genocidal war against its own citizens. Again.    We have seen this before, after all. Many of these tactics are familiar from the government's decades-long war, primarily in the country's south; the scorched-earth approach is Khartoum's signature policy when dealing with rebellion. For years, it has attacked its own civilians in the course of the conflict with the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA). In the past few months, however, Khartoum has turned its attention to the people of Darfur, whom it suspects of aiding two other rebel groups, the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).    Recent promising progress in the peace talks between the government and the SPLA actually contributed to Darfur's downfall. The SLA and, later, the JEM, saw the two-party peace deal as shutting them out of Sudan's future. So they took up arms, scoring some early successes against government installations. This focused the government's wrath, sending its hired Janjaweed militia out against the civilian population of Darfur.    There are strong suspicions that the government has been stringing out the talks with the SPLA simply to provide time to redirect military resources to the Darfur front. In any case, Khartoum almost certainly calculated - correctly - that the international community would be unwilling to speak out about the turmoil in Darfur as long as a deal between the government and the SPLA was so tantalizingly close.    However, the time for the international community to stand by and hope is long past. The government-supported atrocities in Darfur are too horrific and widespread to ignore.    The general silence from the Arab League and the Muslim world over Darfur has been inexcusable. There was some change in rhetoric, however, after the recent Arab League summit in Tunis. The Arab states recognized the existence of major human rights violations in Darfur, the first time the Arab League has blamed one of his members for such violations. While positive, this came after a prolonged period of quiet on a conflict that is, after all, one between Muslims.    The European Union has not fared much better, offering weak words at best. A well-meaning statement by the Irish presidency of the EU last month said only that "it is essential that the Sudanese government fulfill its commitment to control the irregular armed forces known as the Janjaweed." That timid line came a week after US President George W. Bush said Sudan "must immediately stop local militias from committing atrocities against the local population," and also a week after UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan referred to "ethnic cleansing" in Darfur and openly suggested that military intervention might be required.    Europe needs to catch up quickly, acknowledge the severity of the situation in Darfur and use its weight in the UN Security Council. That weight is considerable: In addition to the permanent members - France and the UK - EU member states Germany and Spain are also currently on the Security Council, as is Romania, an EU applicant. They need to push for an emergency session of the Security Council to take up the Darfur issue in a resolution, making it clear to the government of Sudan that the killing must stop, aid must be allowed to go through and displaced people permitted to return home.    The Security Council should in addition authorize all measures short of force, for the moment, to be used against Sudan, but also warn Khartoum of international military intervention if it does not alter its course. Only such an ultimatum will demonstrate that the international community means it when it says "never again" - that we are not going to stand by as another mass slaughter of innocents unfolds before our eyes.    We may be too late to save Darfur's burnt villages, but we can still save hundreds of thousands of lives.    (Emma Bonino is a member of the European Parliament and a former European commissioner; William Shawcross is author, most recently, of "Allies." Both are board members of the International Crisis Group).    27 May, 2004    "Ethnic Cleansing rages in Sudan", Hilary Andersson, BBC World News.    It is being called the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Arab militia men have driven an estimate one million black Sudanese villagers from their homes and there have been massacres on an unknown scale. The crisis in the Darfur region of western Sudan has finally caught the world's attention.    Darfur feels like the end of the earth. Desert winds of the Sahara blow and cause the sands to swirl high, choking anyone in their path. They cloud the barren landscape with an opaque curtain that turns any inhabitants into shadows, that can sometimes barely be made out. We were travelling towards Darfur through roads of deep sand, over land in the remote reaches of eastern Chad, where often there was no road at all.    At a refugee camp near the Sudanese border we began to talk to those who had fled Darfur and I soon realised that these were not normal stories of war. Fadidja Isaac Ali, 35 years old and from a town in Darfur called Mulli, sat before me with her baby in her arms as she talked. She had been shopping at the market in her village when the gunmen came. "The bullets began to fly, people fell, people ran. The evil men had come" she said. "Who are the evil men?" I asked. "The Janjaweed" she said.    On that day in Mullis market, she said, 55 people were massacred. The killers found that Fadidja had survived and three of them took her away, tore her clothes off, beat her, broke her arm and then raped her, one by one. All the stories we heard were similar. No one in the refugee camps spoke of gun battles between soldiers, only of massacres of civilians by the Janjaweed militia - Arab militiamen often seen fighting with the Sudanese government - or of massacres resulting from aerial bombings of villages by Sudanese government planes.    Every time I asked why they thought this was being done to them they said the same thing: "It is because we are black." It may seem strange that here in the middle of Africa, one type of black person - they call themselves Arabs - would drive another blacker type of person from their homes.    But then remember, the Hutus massacred the Tutsis in Rwanda. And whites ethnically cleansed whites in Bosnia. Ethnic cleansing always seems to be rooted in dark historical feuds and it is the same here.    For years there have been tensions between the blacks and Arabs of Darfur over cattle, and now Sudan's government feels threatened by the emergence of rebel groups in the area.    For several days we journeyed on until we reached a tiny village on the border with Darfur. There we met the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) rebels, rebels that try to defend the blacks of Darfur. The commander, Hamis, was in a small mud hut surrounded by sandbags. He was charging his satellite phone from a homemade wooden box of DD batteries, and two 20-year-old M3 rifles were stacked by his bed.    We set off on foot to cross the border into Sudan and into what must be the world's most remote war zone on the edge of the Sahara... in 50 degree heat. My head was thumping from the sun. Eventually we entered a grove of mango trees. Hidden inside were about 30 SLA soldiers. Some were uniformed, some not. One wore a Tommy Hilfiger jacket. They wore amulets on their heads, containing little Muslim prayer books, and each had an old automatic weapon. Then came a distant drone. The young soldiers went quiet, eyes to the sky. Above were government Antonovs capable of carrying a massive amount of explosives. Had the planes bombed we would have been obliterated. I felt strangely cold, and the sickly feeling of fear began to creep in. This is what it must feel like to be a villager in Darfur. The planes continued north, thank God.    The men offered us horses for the rest of the journey and we rode through the heat of the day into the heart of Darfur. The rebels fanned out in front of us in case the Janjaweed militia were in the area. But it was silent here. The villagers had already left or been killed. The villages were burnt, their schools were empty, the books torn up, and the wells had been destroyed so no one could come back. There were abandoned shoes and cooking pots. The place resounded with its own emptiness.    I had spent weeks before my trip trying to find a way of accessing an area nearby, from where stories were filtering out of execution-style massacres. But it was simply too dangerous to go there. So I had asked if an eyewitness to a massacre could get here to meet us. The message miraculously had travelled and one came.    Abdul was from a town called Deliege, where more than 100 black men, he said, were taken off in government trucks to a valley. Abdul says he heard the guns when more than 70 of them were executed by a bullet to the back of the head. He carried a list of those who were killed at other similar massacres nearby. The killings are still going on now. There was another massacre just days ago.    Ethnic cleansing in its rawest form is rampaging unchecked in Darfur. We returned to the mango tree rebel base late at night, and the rebels lit a fire and made tea. Then they escorted us back out into the desert and under the immense black sky and a vast array of stars we crossed back into Chad. It was such a dark night that we could not even see our feet before us. We slept on the ground that night, just across the border from the rebel base.    I woke up when the moon finally rose at three o'clock in the morning. I watched as it cast its pale ghostly light across the cursed land we had seen and wondered, after Rwanda and Bosnia, why Darfur is being allowed to happen?
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