Rape, torture, and one million forced to flee as Sudan's crisis unfolds. W [View All]

[JoFerret]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=514324

Rape, torture, and one million forced to flee as Sudan's crisis unfolds. Will we move to stop it?
By Declan Walsh Africa Correspondent
23 April 2004


The first sign is the ominous drone of a plane. Ageing Russian Antonovs sweep over the remote Sudanese village, dispatching their deadly payload of crude barrel bombs. They explode among the straw-roofed huts, sending terrified families scurrying for safety - but there is none.

Next comes the Janjaweed, a fearsome Arab militia mounted on camels and horses, and armed with AK-47 rifles and whips. They murder the men and boys of fighting age, gang-rape the women - sometimes in front of their families - and burn the houses. The villagers' cattle are stolen, their modest possessions carted off.

Survivors dash for the border with neighbouring Chad, where hordes of Sudanese refugees are clinging to life in an inhospitable desert area, threatened by disease epidemics, looming famine and still more attacks.

This is where some of the world's worst human rights abuses are occurring and nothing is being done to stop it. This is ethnic cleansing Sudanese-style. A government-sponsored campaign, led by Arab tribesmen against their black African neighbours, has triggered the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time and - with the world's eyes fixed on Iraq - its most forgotten calamity.

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