---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Ashworth <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 5:27 PM Subject: [sudan-john-ashworth] Fw: Yet again in Sudan To: Group <[email protected]>
1. Yet Again in Sudan By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF NYT Published: June 29, 2011 The world capital for crimes against humanity this month probably isn’t in Libya or Syria. Instead, it’s arguably the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, where we’re getting accounts of what appears to be a particularly vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing, murder and rape. Damon Winter/The New York Times In its effort to preclude witnesses, the Sudanese government has barred humanitarian access to the area and threatened to shoot down United Nations helicopters. Sudanese troops even detained four United Nations peacekeepers and subjected them to “a mock firing squad,” the U.N. said. An internal U.N. report says that Sudanese authorities are putting on uniforms of the Sudanese Red Crescent — a local version of the Red Cross — to order displaced people to move away from the United Nations compound. They were then herded into a stadium in the town of Kadugli, where their fate is uncertain. Western aid workers have been forced to flee, and there are credible reports of government troops and government-backed Arab militias systematically hunting down members of the black-skinned Nuba ethnic group and killing them. “Door-to-door executions of completely innocent and defenseless civilians, often by throat-cutting, by special internal security forces,” a Westerner with long experience in Sudan recounted in a terse e-mail that I posted on my blog. The writer, who was on the scene but has now left, does not want to be named for fear of losing access. The Rt. Rev. Andudu Elnail, an Episcopal bishop for the Nuba Mountains area, told me that the Sudanese government has targeted many Nuban Christians. Armed forces burned down his cathedral, said Bishop Andudu, who is temporarily in the United States but remains in touch daily with people in the area. “They’re killing educated people, especially black people, and they don’t like the church,” he said. Women are also being routinely raped, Bishop Andudu said, estimating that the death toll is “more than a few thousand” across the Sudanese state of South Kordofan. This isn’t religious warfare, for many Nubans are Muslim and have also been targeted (including a mosque bombed the other day). The Sudanese military has been dropping bombs on markets and village wells. The airstrip that I used when I visited the Nuba Mountains has now been bombed to keep humanitarians from flying in relief supplies; the markets I visited are now deserted, according to accounts smuggled out to monitoring groups. At least 73,000 people have fled their homes, the United Nations says. A network of brave people on the ground, virtually all locals, have been secretly taking photos and transmitting them to human rights organizations in the West like the Enough Project. My hard drive overflows with photos of children bleeding from shrapnel. Samuel Totten, a genocide scholar at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, visited the Nuba Mountains a year ago to gather historical accounts of the mass killings of Nuba by the Sudanese government in the 1990s. Now, he says, it is all beginning to happen again. “As I watch the international community dither as the people of the Nuba Mountains are being killed, impunity reigns,” said Professor Totten. The Sudanese government signed a framework agreement on Tuesday that could be a step to end the violence in South Kordofan, but there has been no deal on cessation of hostilities. Sudan has a long record of agreements reached and then breached (by the South as well as the North). Sudan is preparing for a split on July 9, when South Sudan emerges as an independent nation after decades of on-and-off war between North and South. The Nuba Mountains will remain in the North when the South secedes, but many Nuba sided with the South during the war and still serve in a rebel military force dug into the mountains. Most of the violence in the Nuba Mountains has been by northern Arabs against the Nuba, but there are also reports of rebel soldiers attacking Arab civilians. There is a risk that violence will spread to the neighboring state of Blue Nile and ultimately trigger a full-blown North-South war, although both sides want to avoid that. It’s critical that the United Nations retain its presence. Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, already indicted for genocide in Darfur, is now visiting China, and Chinese leaders need to insist that he stop the killing of civilians and allow the U.N. to function. The appeals from Nubans today feel like an anguished echo of those from Darfur eight years ago. Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization that has long worked in the Nuba Mountains, said it received a message from a Nuban pastor: “With grief today, I want to inform you that the new church is burned down. We have lost everything. The house where my staff lives was looted, and the offices were burned. Many people fled from town, but some stayed. There is no food or water now.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/opinion/30kristof.html?_r=1 END1 2. Sudanese government bombs village in new border war with south War plane drops five bombs, killing 16 people including two young children, in attack on village in Nuba mountains * Julie Flint * guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 June 2011 11.26 BST Sixteen people, including eight women and children, were killed when a Sudanese war plane bombed a village in the Nuba mountains, which for three weeks has been the scene of daily aerial attacks in a new war along the country's volatile north-south border. Medical staff at a nearby clinic said the dead included a three-year-old child and an eight-month-old baby. They said another 32 people were wounded in Sunday's attack, many of them seriously. A Nuba witness to the aftermath of the attack said a government Antonov plane had dropped five bombs on the market and water point of Kurchi, a village in a part of the mountains controlled by Nuba enrolled in the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) of South Sudan. Fierce fighting erupted between the Nuba SPLA and Sudanese government troops and militias on 5 June. The Nuba leader, Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, told an African Union panel headed by the former South African president Thabo Mbeki that the trigger for the conflict was an order that his men be disarmed by 1 June. According to a report of the meeting seen by the Guardian, Hilu told Mbeki that more than 3,000 people had disappeared – "either killed or their whereabouts are not known, either because they are Nuba or they are SPLA". The Nuba mountains lie in South Kordofan state, on the southern edge of Sudan's Arabised north. Many Nuba fought alongside the southern SPLA in the 22-year civil war, seeking democracy, development and respect for the languages, religious observances and culture of the Nuba tribes. The peace agreement that ended the civil war in 2005 and gave the SPLA a share in government in South Kordofan denied the Nuba self-determination and did not specify what would happen to the 30,000-strong Nuba rebel army in the event of South Sudan voting for independence. Senior Sudanese officers have told the African Union panel that Khartoum's air campaign is aimed at preventing the SPLA in South Sudan resupplying the Nuba. Antonovs and Chinese-made MIG-29s have bombed Kauda, east of Kurchi, on four occasions, destroying an airstrip where Khartoum claims weapons have been flown in from the south. Kurchi, a village in the foothills of the mountains, has no airstrip. It is a market town of about 400 homes and lies on the main road between government-controlled Kadugli, the state capital, and SPLA-controlled Kauda. The UN peacekeeping mission in South Kordofan, UNMIS, is under orders from the Sudanese government to withdraw from the state by 9 July, the day South Sudan officially declares independence. The mission's reports for Sunday 26 June make no mention of any military activity. A senior UN official said the mission was already "deaf and blind" in South Kordofan as a result of increasing belligerence towards it by Sudanese troops, police and militias. In one of the most serious incidents to date, on 17 June, an UN patrol was detained by government troops and subjected to a mock firing squad in army headquarters in Kadugli. A UN report seen by the Guardian said the peacekeepers "were lined up and a SAF [Sudan Armed Forces] officer cocked his AK-47 and pointed it at them … They were told that UNMIS must 'leave South Kordofan, or we will kill you if you come back here'." http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/28/sudanese-bomb-village-border-war END2 ______________________ John Ashworth Sudan Advisor [email protected] +254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile) +249 919 695 362 (Sudan mobile) +27 82 853 3556 (South Africa mobile) +44 750 304 1790 (UK/international) +88 216 4334 0735 (Thuraya satphone) PO Box 52002 - 00200, Nairobi, Kenya This is a personal e-mail address and the contents do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation -- The content of this message does not necessarily reflect John Ashworth's views. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, John Ashworth is not the author of the content and the source is always cited. 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