Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

This is an editorial from the Daily News, Halifax, N.S.
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Ten years after the horrors of the genocide in Rwanda, another tragedy is unfolding in Africa, a continent that has seen more than its share of strife and suffering for far too long. The setting this time is Sudan, a country that is divided by race and religion, but united in war and woe.

In Rwanda, the majority Hutu carried out a brutal slaughter of the minority Tutsi. Moderate Hutu also died.

The death toll was between 800,000 and one million people: shot, clubbed and hacked to death with machetes. The killing lasted for about a month, and ended only when an army of Tutsi exiles overthrew the government.

The division in Sudan, the largest country in Africa in terms of land mass, is between the predominantly Arab and Muslim north, and the predominantly black and non-Muslim south. But the situation isn't that simple. In Rwanda, the line between Tutsi and Hutu was sometimes blurred; and in Sudan, some of the Muslims in the north are black, not Arab. The protagonists are a fundamentalist government in the north and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army in the south.

The conflict in Sudan has been going on much longer than a month — it began in 1983, marking the end to the calm that followed a previous civil war. Yet the ethnic and religious warfare has endured for centuries, with only its intensity changing.

Events in the Middle East, especially the burgeoning scandal over American mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq, has pushed the ongoing tragedy in Sudan into the background. But even in the absence of other events, Sudan seldom made the front pages.

Human Rights Watch would put it in banner headlines if it could. In a report released last week, the group alleged that the northern-based government is conducting a campaign of "ethnic cleansing," and even genocide, against a southern region called Darfur.

Deaths are reported to number in the thousands, and more than one million people are said to have fled the area. And this is during what had previously been considered a time of promising peace negotiations between the north and the south.

The human-rights group says the perpetrators of the aggression are soldiers and nomadic Arabs who terrorize black communities.

The Human Rights Watch report concluded: "Ten years after the Rwandan genocide, and despite years of soul-searching, the response of the international community to the events in Sudan has been nothing short of shameful."

And if Sudan turns out to be another Rwanda, those words will prove prophetic.