by: Mr. Tony R. Perkins
In fact, if we would just listen, we can hear the militia condemned with the words from their own mouths. In a recent account, militia members told why they engage in the systematic rape of African women during raids on villages. They want to create "light skin babies". The attackers are ethnically Arab; the women raped are black African. They seek to destroy the African cultural and racial groups by "converting" the children of the raped African women into "Arabs." The fact that this is a bizarre ethnic fantasy does not lessen the suffering of the women who are subjected to it.
The systematic rape of non-northern, non-Arab, non-Muslim women has been going on for years in Sudan. United Nations reporters, human rights groups, religious organizations, and others had reported on the attacks on villages, in which the men and elderly are killed and the women and children are taken hostage. The children are fated to have their tendons cut and forced to watch over herds of goats. If they displease their masters, they are tortured. Some are beaten to death; some have been crucified.
The fate of the women taken hostage is equally grim. They are systematically raped. Often kept in pens like animals, they are raped repeatedly by their captors as they journey north. They are raped both to break their will and to force them to have "light skin babies". And as has been documented by both religious leaders and Members of the U.S. Congress, women and children are also branded, like animals.
What word describes such treatment of one human being by another? The only word is slavery. Those who aren't killed are enslaved and treated like animals. In fact, they are treated worse than animals - anyone who tortured animals like this would be arrested in the U.S. But these women and child hostages are taken to slave markets in the north of Sudan, and are sold. They are then "owned" by someone else.
This is the reality of Sudan. It is an ugly reality. Until recently, the victims were Christian and animist people of the south. Many observers had hoped the attacks - the murder, the brandings and the rapes - would cease as the government and southern rebels signed documents that appeared to be moving the country toward peace. But, as has happened over and over again during the last 20 years in Sudan, the government took advantage of peace in one part of the country to open a new front against the civilians of another area. It is now focusing its genocidal energy on the black Muslim people of Darfur in the west.
full article:
http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=PV04H01What's behind the horror in Sudan?LAST WEEK, the Bush administration was forced to admit that a genocide is taking place in western Sudan--carried out by a regime that the U.S. had hoped to bring into its camp. Stories of the horror committed against the African farming villages in Sudan’s Darfur region finally emerged in the U.S. media, but the U.S. government’s interest is anything but compassionate.
The finding of genocide is calculated to pressure the United Nations (UN) Security Council to threaten sanctions and force a UN inquiry that could lead to charges of war crimes. Council member China may block these actions, but plans, backed by the U.S., to enlarge an armed African Union force in Sudan will go forward.
DAVID WHITEHOUSE looks at the background to the crisis--and the cynical role played by the U.S.
full article:
http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-2/512/512_05_Sudan.shtml
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