Mick Hartley

The forgotten war in Darfur, from Mark Leon Goldberg – A Genocidal Army is About to Win the War in Darfur and No One Seems to Be Paying Attention:

The Rapid Support Forces are on the march.

This is the mostly ethnic-Arab paramilitary group which grew out of the Janjwaweed militia that perpetrated the Darfur genocide 20 years ago. Since April, the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces have been fighting a civil war for control of Sudan. At present, the RSF controls much of Khartoum, the capital. The Sudanese Armed Forces control the major seaside city, Port Sudan, in the east of the country.

To the west in Darfur, the RSF clearly has the upper hand and are now poised to take control of the entire region. And it is here where the patterns of the 2003 Darfur genocide are being repeated today.

Nearly 450,000 people have fled across the border to Chad. These refugees are mostly from the non-Arab Massalit tribe that has been systematically targeted by the RSF in well documented cases of ethnic cleansing. Entire villages have been burned to the ground. Human Rights Watch has reported a campaign of sexual violence targeting Massalit women. Summary executions are rampant. Mass graves are littered throughout the region.

In one massacre in the city of el-Geneina, RSF soldiers emptied the city of its Massalit population and shot civilians as they fled. This was a major mass atrocity event that was reconstructed two months later in a vivid CNN report based on open source investigations and survivor testimony. […]

By the numbers, the war in Sudan is the worst humanitarian situation in the world. Over 5 million people are internally displaced and over 1.2 million people have fled Sudan all together. More than half the population, nearly 25 million people, are in need of some form of humanitarian assistance. And on top of it all, a probable genocide — the crime of all crimes(!) — is driving this situation deeper into the abyss.

It is a profound indictment of our foreign policy community that this crisis is seemingly so far off the radar. To be sure, the broader humanitarian community are deeply engaged in this crisis and there’s been some vital reporting. But it has not captured much diplomatic or political attention — at least not commensurate to the sheer scale of the unfolding disaster.

Well, at the risk of being glib – no Jews, and Arabs as genocidal aggressors against African tribes…does not compute.