Atrocities in Sudan are ‘man’s worst inhumanity to man’: US lawmakers
WASHINGTON, July 6 (AFP) — Two US lawmakers who just returned from a three-day visit to Darfur, Sudan, described an unrelenting spasm of killing, rape and pillaging, which the Khartoum government does little if anything to check.
“We heard countless stories about rape, murder and plunder. We talked to rape victims. We saw the scars on men who had been shot. We watched mothers cradle their sick and dying babies, hoping against all odds that their children would survive,” said US Representative Frank Wolf, at a press conference, calling the atrocities, “the worst of man’s inhumanity to man.”
He was accompanied on the trip by Republican Senator Sam Brownback who expressed horror and outrage at the atrocities.
“It is ethnic cleansing. I believe that clearly the seeds of genocide have been sown in Darfur,” Browback said.
At least 10,000 people have been killed in Darfur, western Sudan, since fighting broke out in February last year, when black African rebel groups rose up against the Arab government in Khartoum.
The United Nations has labeled the situation in Darfur the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell on a recent visit delivered a stern warning to Khartoum to ease the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
Wolf said the perpetrators of the recent violence — the armed Janjaweed militia which has received tacit, and some allege, concrete support from the goverment — were a constant presence at the outskirts of refugee camps where Darfuris had fled in search of safety.
“The Janjaweed, some clad in military uniforms, would come galloping in on horseback and camels to finish the job by killing and raping and stealing and plundering,” said Wolf.
“The Janjaweed made certain there would be nothing left for the villagers to come home to. Huts were torched; donkeys, goats and cows stolen, slaughtered; grain containers destroyed,” the Republican congressman said.
“What is happening in Darfur is rooted in ethnic cleansing,” he said.
Wolf said he and Brownback received a letter from 44 rape victims, begging for international intervention.
“As a result of that savagery, some of us became pregnant. Some have aborted, some took out their wombs and some are still receiving medical treatment,” Wolf said, reading from the letter.
“We list the names of the raped women, and state that we have high hopes in you and the international community to stand by us, not to forsake us to this tyrannical, brutal and racist regime, which wants to eliminate us racially, bearing in mind that 90 percent of our sisters at this camp are widows.”
Brownback echoed the calls for a swift and concerted international response.
“If the government of Sudan will not solve the security crisis, then the international community must,” he said.
“We must pressure as well the international community, through the UN (United Nations), to make Darfur an urgent top-priority issue,” said Brownback.
Sudan’s interior minister, Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein, Tuesday unveiled a series of measures in a bid to restore law and order following recent UN and US pressure on Darfur, ordering police stations to open in refugee camps.