Mick Hartley

The forgotten conflict in Sudan, from Jane Flanagan in the Times – ‘My dark skin is a death sentence in Darfur’:

The threat of genocide has returned to Darfur, the western region of Sudan that two decades ago bore witness to the mass killing of at least 300,000 people from non-Arab communities during an ethnic cleansing by Janjawid paramilitary forces.

“Anyone with darker skin is their target,” Yagob, a 40-year-old trader, told The Times from El Fasher, the besieged city in Darfur, and its last not under the control of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a Janjawid reincarnation. His Zaghawa community were among the ethnic African groups that were killed or deliberately starved to death. Yagob doubts he will survive a second genocide of his people.

The UN warned of mass slaughter if the RSF tried to break the Sudanese military’s hold on El Fasher, a year into the battle for power between the country’s leading generals.

“History is repeating itself in Darfur in the worst possible way,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, said, referring to the genocide which began in 2003 and the first ethnic slaughter of the 21st century that attracted global attention.

She predicted “a large-scale massacre” in any battle for El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, where half a million people, mostly from the communities targeted in the last genocide, are now cut off from help, with dwindling food and fuel….

Most of those cowering in El Fasher, including Yagob’s family, had been hounded from their own villages elsewhere in Darfur. Witnesses reported a revival of Janjawid-style terror tactics including “slave hunts” in which girls and women have been rounded up by the militia.

An estimated between 10,000 and 15,000 civilians were killed during an attack on the city of El Geneina, in west Darfur, last October, according to UN investigators. Most of the victims were from ethnic African groups….

Nine million people have been displaced since the fighting erupted in Sudan last April, first in street battles in the capital, Khartoum, and later spreading to other urban areas and to the vast Darfur region. The death toll from a year of conflict is not known, but some estimations put it as high as 150,000. Aid agencies warn of a looming famine with 25 million people in need of aid.

No one's interested, though. Wrong perpetrators.

Whoever's doing the PR for Arabs is doing one hell of a job. One of the darkest imperial expansions – across northern Africa as Islam was spread by the sword: ignored or downplayed, as only Western imperialism counts. Look at all those lovely mosques they built! The brutal history of centuries of slavery – black Africans dragged, chained, in camel trains across the deserts to Arabia, and the Barbary Coast raids on northern Europe: only the Atlantic slave trade counts.

And now, largely Arab groups slaughter black Africans and have "slave hunts", with women and girls being rounded up…it doesn't make the news apart from the odd largely ignored report on the back pages, like this. In Gaza, though, the Arabs are the biggest victims ever as the Israelis take strong action to counter the Hamas Islamic jihad against Jews, and the world explodes in protest. It's genocide, they cry.

Nice work if you can get it.