Summary
A GENERATION ago, British schoolchildren still learned about the Sudan in their history books. They read of the 19th-century imperial hero, General Gordon, slain at the siege of Khartoum by the Mahdi, the fanatical Muslim leader of a jihad against not just British rule but the Christian communities along the upper Nile. Then the fog of historical amnesia fell over Britain and the Western world regarding the African country below Egypt. That amnesia has had terrible consequences for the people of Sudan. For more than 20 years, those living in the south faced a brutal civil war and famine while the attention of the world lay elsewhere. Now a new crisis in the west is culminating in genocide on a scale which threatens to match that last seen in Rwanda a decade ago.
Before we point the finger of blame, it is worth recording the sheer magnitude of hellishness which is unfolding inside Sudan. In recent months, some 30,000 black Sudanese Muslims have been deliberately butchered by Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, apparently backed by government forces. Some of the systematic murders are carried out with ancient medieval barbarity: gun, knife, sword and club. Others are processed by modern, industrial methods: villages are bombed from the air. Those women who survive are usually raped. Whole villages are being eradicated and fields and wells despoiled. As a result, one-fifth of the population in an area the size of France is fleeing for its life. Tens of thousands of refugees have already escaped to neighbouring Chad, where they subsist on desperately limited international aid.See the full content of this document
Extract
Leader: The Genocide That the World has Ignored
Their existence is paradise compared to the fate that awaits the one million refugees still trapped inside the Sudanese nightmare. If these tragic people escape bomb, bullet and rape, they face starvation. But this is no ordinary famine. According to a Uni...
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