Another Genocide In Sudan?

Omar al-Bashir: Mass-mudering jihadist war criminal

This disturbing piece in TIME magazine highlights the now very real possibility of another genocide in Sudan:

Sudan's history is strewn with cases of mass atrocities against non-Arabs in the south and north, with Darfur being only the latest; reports in recent weeks from Sudan's South Kordofan state suggest history could be repeating itself yet again. There, members of a minority, opposition-aligned African ethnic group are being slaughtered "like animals," in the words of one alarming church statement. The diverse tribes live in a rugged land of mud-hut villages called the Nuba Mountains. So far, besides an aerial-bombardment campaign against the Nuba areas, the targeted killings against them have been mostly confined to the major towns, as tens of thousands flee into the hills where, for now, they are mostly safe.

But internal U.N. documents obtained by TIME show that refuge might soon come under attack too. Hundreds of military vehicles have streamed into South Kordofan's capital of Kadugli, the center of the bloodbath, according to U.N. reports. Preparations for a major ground offensive were becoming increasingly clear, the U.N. Kadugli base warned in a June 15 confidential dispatch, which urgently called for political intervention to ward off the crisis.

As well as racial tension between the Arabs and the blacks, the slaughter in Sudan is also, as described by the perpetrators, a textbook Islamic jihad. Only three days ago, Christians and their churches in the South Kordofan area were brutally assaulted by Muslims allied to the Sudanese government, who screamed "Allahu Akbar!" as they attacked. As described by Nina Shea of the Centre For Religious Freedom, Sudan's war criminal President Omar al-Bashir has for many years waged an explicitly self-defined "jihad" against the predominantly black Christians (and fellow Muslims) of Sudan, while according to the man's own documented words, his long-term intention is to implement sharia law in his country. And we're not talking the fluffy, friendly "family law" version of sharia that many Western commentators assure us is the sole function of Islamic law, but full-fledged, Dark Ages barbarity, including but not limited to the brutal flogging of women:

Separately, Mr Bashir also commented on a recent high-profile case in which a video posted on the internet showed a woman being flogged by police in the north.

"If she is lashed according to Sharia law, there is no investigation. Why are some people ashamed? This is Sharia," the president said.

Also according to Shea:

For years Khartoum has treated the black, Sufi Muslims of Darfur as second-class citizens, systematically discriminating against them in providing development opportunities, government services, and positions of power. When they rebelled against this policy of extreme marginalization, they became — in the view of a regime that conflates religion with politics — "apostate." Under Islamist rules, apostates are to be put to death or taken as slaves. In 1992, six pro-government Sudanese imams issued a fatwa making this explicit: "An insurgent who was previously a Muslim is now an apostate and a non-Muslim is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam, and Islam has granted the freedom of killing both of them." Though the fatwa was intended at that time for the Muslims of the central Nuba province and the Christians and animists of the south, it equally applies today to the Muslims of Darfur.

Despite President Obama dedicating a "generous" two-minute radio address to these jihadist atrocities a few days ago, the international community has by and large tragically and shamefully failed to act decisively in bringing Omar al-Bashir and his Islamic supremacist cronies to justice. The results have been disastrous, and could end up even more so, as the TIME piece solemnly concludes:

In the early 1900s, Winston Churchill, then a young British soldier on a military campaign in Sudan, described how a fierce Sudanese battalion was sent down to fight the Nuba, a "mountain people who cared for nothing but their independence," just to give the elite soldiers something to do. In the 1990s, as many as half a million Nuba were killed when the Sudanese government declared jihad against them. When I was in the Nuba Mountains in April, I found a people terrified that war would return but resigned to their frightful and uncertain future. Given their history and the history of their government, they seem to have good reasons to be fearful.