The most vicious ethnic cleansing you've never heard of is unfolding here in the southeastern fringes of the Sahara Desert. It's a campaign of murder, rape and pillage by Sudan's Arab rulers that has forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages.kristof also notes that the bush administration has been better than prior administrations in dealing with the ongoing civil war in southern sudan, which is true (although unfortunately it's also not saying all that much). but he doesn't mention why the bush administration has taken an interest in sudan's civil war in the south.
The desert is strewn with the carcasses of cattle and goats, as well as fresh refugee graves that are covered with brush so wild animals will not dig them up. Refugees crowd around overused wells, which now run dry, and they mourn loved ones whose bodies they cannot recover.
Western and African countries need to intervene urgently. Sudan's leaders should not be able to get away with mass murder just because they are shrewd enough to choose victims who inhabit a poor region without airports, electricity or paved roads.
The culprit is the Sudanese government, one of the world's nastiest. Its Arab leaders have been fighting a civil war for more than 20 years against its rebellious black African south. Lately it has armed lighter-skinned Arab raiders, the Janjaweed, who are killing or driving out blacks in the Darfur region near Chad.
the civil war in the south is between the largely christian locals and the muslim arabs who dominate the national government and control the army. as the civil war is one of the front lines between christianity and islam, it has become a cause celebre among the christian right. the brutality of the fundamentalist sudanese government against the christian rebels fits nicely into their simplistic image of islam, an image that has only been enhanced since 9/11. bush's relative activisim on the issue, i think, has more to do with pandering to the christian right than anything else.
don't get me wrong, trying to stop the brutal civil war in the south is the right thing to do. i just question the administration's motives. i could be wrong. maybe i'm just cynical.
but the new ethnic cleansing in the darfar region of western sudan is bush's chance to prove me wrong. because of the attention to the civil war in the south, the government has largely halted its offensive there and instead gone after the muslim non-arabs in darfar. because this is not a christian region, i think the sudanese government is betting that the west will not care about its crimes there. and i think they're probably right. time will tell whether the president makes any effort to stop this sudanese offensive. if he doesn't i expect that a few years from how some american leaders will be apologizing for their inaction in this latest bout of genocide in a forgotten corner of the african continent.
