The Total Humanitarian Embargo Against Rebel-held Areas of South Kordofan and Blue Nile Remains in Place
Eric Reeves | September 26, 2018 | https://wp.me/s45rOG-8835
The Khartoum regime has issued a particularly pernicious falsehood concerning humanitarian aid in Sudan, reported by Sudan Tribune (September 24, 2018). The South Kordofan/Blue Nile Humanitarian Coordination Unit confirms that no humanitarian aid from Sudan is reaching rebel-held areas of either of these “Two Areas,” despite Khartoum’s self-serving claim:
Sudan begins to deliver humanitarian aid to rebel-held areas in Two Areas: official | Sudan Tribune, September 24, 2018 (KHARTOUM)
Sudanese Presidential Assistant Faisal Hassan Ibrahim Monday announced the government has begun to deliver humanitarian aid to rebel-held areas in the South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. Speaking at a workshop on the international standard framework for humanitarian assistance in Khartoum, Ibrahim said the government has accepted the US proposal to allow humanitarian access to the Two Areas but the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/North (SPL-M) rejected it.
He pointed out that the government has started to provide aid from inside Sudan to the people in the rebel-held areas, stressing his government’s keenness to achieve peace and development in the country. Ibrahim added the government seeks to move from humanitarian assistance to sustainable development.
This is simply false: the people in rebel-held areas of South Kordofan and Blue Nile continue to be held hostage to a total humanitarian embargo, imposed by the Khartoum regime in summer 2011. The international community has allowed this embargo—amounting to a crime against humanity—to continue, refusing to compel Khartoum to allow necessary food and medicine to reach people who have been subjected to brutal military assault for more than seven years.
If the international community allows this patent falsehood to stand without challenge, it will be even more deeply complicit in the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
See | “On the Obstruction of Humanitarian Aid,” African Studies Review, Volume 54, Number 3 (December 2011), pages 165 – 74 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-I6 — I argue that such obstruction as we see in South Kordofan and Blue Nile amounts to a “crime against humanity” under international humanitarian law.
For the most recent (August 2018) report on the situation in South Kordofan/Blue Nile Humanitarian Coordination Unit on the situation in the “Two Areas,” see | https://wp.me/p45rOG-2io . South Kordofan/Blue Nile Humanitarian Coordination Unit confirms today that there is no humanitarian assistance reaching rebel-held areas of either South Kordofan or Blue Nile.
A starving child in South Kordofan may live…or may not
For five years, the Khartoum regime subjected South Kordofan and Blue Nile civilians to a savage campaign of aerial bombardment, targeting villages and agriculture in particular. There were countless injuries and deaths from the shrapnel-loaded barrel bombs dropped indiscriminately by the regime’s high-flying Antonov “bombers” (crudely retrofitted cargo planes from which bombs were pushed out the cargo bay with no sighting mechanism). The bombing may well begin again.
People were forced by Khartoum’s bombing to live in caves, where they often had little food and water, and were barely able to live.