A Compendium of Recent Brief Commentaries/News Dispatches on Violence in Darfur
Eric Reeves | June 16 – June 30, 2018 | https://wp.me/p45rOG-2fQ (see also @SudanReeves on Twitter)
June 30, 2018: Below is Darfur dispatch from Radio Dabanga that is notable for several reasons: it provides more evidence that violently expropriated farmlands will not be surrendered by those who seized them; and the armed Arab groups responsible for the seizures are willing to attack even police trying to prevent violence against the farmers who are rightful owners:
June 29, 2018: Amnesty International, June 28, 2018: “Down-Sized UN Mission for an Over-Sized Human Rights Crisis.” An excellent if necessarily incomplete 12-page report on recent violence in Darfur; it contains many revealing satellite photos of village destruction | https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR5486802018ENGLISH.pdf :
June 28, 2018: “Dangers to Darfuris Attempting to Return to Their Villages and Lands Increase with Collapse of UNAMID,” June 28, 2018 | https://wp.me/p45rOG-2fN With a presence that will soon be confined to the Jebel Marra area, UNAMID has failed as a Darfur peace-keeping/-making mission:
June 28, 2018: The UN, the African Union, and rest of the international community continue to pretend that peace can come to Darfur in the absence of safe returns and restoration of agricultural lands violently expropriated from non-Arab/African farmers—and now occupied by armed Arab groups. UNAMID is—and has always been—simply impotent in addressing this issue:
June 24, 2018: The denial of humanitarian access to desperate populations in Darfur has been one of the Khartoum regime’s most effective genocidal weapons over the past 15 years—and nowhere more successfully than in Jebel Marra, which has been a particular target. The present mirrors the past:
June 23, 2018: Khartoum has long targeted camp leaders in Darfur, but the attack on Sheikh Jumaa Mohamed Yousef is especially notable because he spoke often with Radio Dabanga. UNAMID is almost completely worthless in preventing and investigating such attacks; the further force reductions just voted on by the UN Security Council will make for more killings:
June 22, 2018: Real peace Darfur is possible only when those who have been violently displaced can return safely to their lands and villages, and violently expropriated lands are returned to their owners. Neither the ”Troika,” the UN, the worthless “Doha Document for Peace in Darfur,” nor feckless African Union “diplomats”—most notably the failing and corrupt Thabo Mbeki—acknowledges this basic fact:
June 21, 2018: “Even in Finally Speaking About Jebel Marra (Darfur), the International Community Prevaricates,” June 21, 2018 | wp.me/p45rOG-2fI
Whether about number of newly displaced persons, responsibility for civilian destruction, or denial of relief access, the “Troika” speaks disingenuously:
June 21, 2018: Indulging in a reprehensible “moral equivalence” between the genocidal Khartoum regime and SLA/AW rebels [ https://bit.ly/2tq2zA8 ], the “Troika” statement (June 19, 2018) also misrepresents displacement in Jebel Marra, Darfur—a misrepresentation corrected by ICC Prosecutor Bensouda in reporting to the UN Security Council:
June 20, 2018: Sudan/Darfur: The international community has a long and expedient history of “moral equivalence” when speaking of the genocidal Khartoum regime and the various rebel movements in the marginalized regions of greater Sudan. Such “equivalence” is always regarded as a political and diplomatic victory by Khartoum’s génocidaires:
June 19, 2018: “Human Rights Watch: UN’s Planned Cuts to Darfur Mission Risk Rights Protection: Security Council Should Preserve Monitoring, Reporting Across the Region” (New York, June 18, 2018) |
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/06/18/sudan-uns-planned-cuts-darfur-mission-risk-rights-protection :
June 19, 2018: “The World is Silent as Khartoum Continues Its Genocidal Assault on Civilians in Jebel Marra, Darfur,” June 19, 2018: https://wp.me/p45rOG-2fB The complete silence of the international community, in the face of continuing genocide, is a fact that history will judge savagely:
June 19, 2018: UNAMID is compounding its abject failure in Jebel Marra, Darfur: unable to protect civilians from attacks and displacement, the Mission also cannot secure humanitarian access to people in the most acute distress. A newly posted video (June 17, 2018) from Radio Dabanga is painfully revealing: https://bit.ly/2ljPFzY :
June 18, 2018: Khartoum’s barbaric assault on the people of Jebel Marra—overwhelmingly from the non-Arab/African populations in the area—continues unabated, and on the very doorstep of the UNAMID base at Golo, supposedly agreed to by the regime a year ago, but still not operational:
June 17, 2018: Despite a supposed focus on Jebel Marra, the UN/African Union Mission in Darfur continues to prove helpless and useless as Khartoum continues it brutal, indiscriminate campaign in the region. UNAMID describes the violence as “sporadic”—another cruel lie to the people of Darfur:
