As Rwanda marks genocide, killing rages in Sudan
By Matthew Green
KIGALI, April 6 (Reuters) – Militiamen are killing villagers in a far-away African country. Men are tortured, women raped. The world calls for the violence to stop. The killing continues.
As Rwanda remembers the 10th anniversary of its genocide this week, aid workers are drawing parallels with a conflict gripping Sudan’s remote western Darfur region today.
Sudan’s government and horseback Arab militias are conducting a scorched earth policy against villages perceived to back rebels, in violence in which thousands have been killed and 830,000 forced to flee in the past year, rights groups say.
While the scale of the bloodshed is far smaller than the Rwandan genocide, when about 800,000 people were believed to have been massacred in 100 days, a senior U.N. official said last month the systematic killing was reminiscent of Rwanda.
“It’s very ironic that on the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide the United Nations is sounding the alert about something that may develop into another genocide and very few people are responding,” Jemera Rone, a researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.
“People just don’t seem to feel passionately about the possibility of such a recurrence — another genocide,” she said.
The Khartoum government reacts angrily to any use of the word genocide in connection with Darfur.
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is expected to attend a genocide memorial service in Rwanda on Wednesday, officials in Kigali say.
ETHNIC DIVIDE
Conflict has long simmered in impoverished Darfur, but the situation escalated sharply when two rebel groups launched an uprising in February last year, accusing the government of depriving their region of its fair share of wealth and power.
The accusations — denied by the government — echo complaints made by rebels in a separate, 20-year civil war in Sudan’s south, which appears to be edging towards an end.
Darfur’s barren plains and crags look very different from the lush hilltop farms, coffee plantations and lakeside towns of tiny Rwanda, more than 1,000 km (600 miles) to the south, but there are some similarities.
The roots of Rwanda’s genocide lay partly in an ethnic divide between the ruling Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority. There is also an ethnic split in Darfur, where rebels drawn mainly from African tribes like the Zaghawa and Masaalit say they are being persecuted by Arab raiders backed by Khartoum.
Like Rwanda before the genocide, the Darfur conflict has won scant international attention, unfolding in remote villages scattered across a region of seven million inhabitants with roughly the same surface area as Iraq.
The U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, Mukesh Kapila, who was in Rwanda in 1994, said last month that human rights violations in Darfur were taking place on a scale increasingly comparable to situations like Rwanda during the genocide.
Much of the killing in Rwanda was carried out by militia armed and trained by ethnic Hutu extremists in the military who aimed to exterminate minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates.
Human Rights Watch issued a report last week accusing the Sudanese government of arming 20,000 Arab militiamen responsible for many of the attacks on African villages. The government says the militia, and the rebels, are outlaws.
The United States and European Union have encouraged both government and rebels to attend talks in neighbouring Chad, but so far they have had negligible impact on the ground.
“The scale of the violence is indescribable,” said Coralie Lechelle, an emergency coordinator with medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres, who has just returned from four months in Darfur. “In every village they’re talking about hundreds of people killed.”