Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Khartoum Does It Again
The Khartoum government is demanding that Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs), or refugees spread across Sudan's western frontier, return to their destroyed and infertile villages. The UN, gutless enough to try to remain on Khartoum's good side, prefaces the article by noting that its author's perspective doesn't necessarily reflect the opinion of the United Nations. The article, though, alludes to a report that the Sudanese government has prepared relocation plans for the hundreds of thousands of IDPs stranded in Sudan. This is eerily reminiscent of Mengistu's forced relocation of Oromos, Tigreans and Eritreans in 1980s Ethiopia, which resulted in the deaths of millions via famine and wanton slaughter at the hands of government troops and East German secret police, although the people of Darfur have already been forcibly removed from their villages, once, by the Janjaweed.
The worst part about Khartoum's plan, besides forcibly moving people back into decrepit and unsafe villages, is the government's failure, thusfar, to protect the refugees and the Fur people from the Janjaweed and its failure to ensure the general security and health of a people its fought to maintain control of.
The worst part about Khartoum's plan, besides forcibly moving people back into decrepit and unsafe villages, is the government's failure, thusfar, to protect the refugees and the Fur people from the Janjaweed and its failure to ensure the general security and health of a people its fought to maintain control of.
