Darfur young generations between Sudan’s NCP devil and the Mediterranean
By Hussien Arko Menay
Every single second on this earth alarms human conscience to act urgently to save mankind as well as other living creatures. Unfortunately, most of the damage to the universe is caused by man. The man is responsible for today’s environmental damage and the crimes against humanity.
A large number of animals and plants of today are facing extinction because simply man accumulates things due to the instinct of acquisition that driven by mere greed rather than the motive of basic necessities such as food, shelter and medicine. For instance African elephants are killed in thousands every day for their ivory which has become very lucrative market of antiques and ornaments in many Asian countries in the Pacific and the African leopard is a rare source of shoes and ceremonial costume for some tribes in the continent as the expensive spotty hide of leopard gives social status for those who afford to wear it, especially during social ceremonies. Large tropical zones in Africa, Amazon and Southeast Asia is a constant change from wet to dry and the creeping of the desert is in a speedy rolling against vegetation, peeling the green surface of the rainforest of these regions. This all happens not because it is wrong in the earth’s climate but because our greed in owning timber for decoration and luxury.
In the region of Darfur in the west of the Sudan, there is a similar malicious human activity orchestrated by the NCP Regime of Khartoum going on since 2003. However, this activity and its catastrophic effect has gone beyond the destruction of animals and vegetation and their habitats and exceeded to human destruction. The racial oriented ideology is the destructive weapon used by Omer Al Basheer to dislocate the deep-rooted ethnic community of Darfur to replace them by Arab nomads imported from across the border of Sudan, namely from Mali, Niger and Chad. This policy of demographic engineering started early in 1982 last century and triggered to a very sensitive point in 1991 when Al Basheer appointed one of his Generals called Mustafa El-Dabi to oversee the operation of demographic change in the West Darfur against the Indigenous Masaleet in favour of newcomers from nomadic Arabs and since then the plan has exponentially increased.
For this reason and other reasons related to inequality practised by the Khartoum Regime against the people of Darfur, insurgency erupted in 2003 across the region and the government of Khartoum allocated more than 75%of the National budget to use it against its own people in Darfur in a full scale war supported by the Government militia called Janjaweed.
Due to this excessive military aggression, hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, millions were either in refugee camps or internally displaced camps in a situation described as a genocide and as a result, Omer al-Bashir the head of the State was indicted by the International Criminal Court.
Another catastrophic phenomenon resulted from this demographic engineering policy is the systematic targeting of the young generation of particular ethnic groups ( Zaghawa, Fur and Masaleet and black ethnicities) flee the country to nowhere. Most of these young people take a very hazardous long trip through the extraordinarily hostile desert to the Libyan or Egyptian Coasts to resume another journey to the European Coasts.
Their journey from Darfur to the Coasts of the Mediterranean is a picnic when compared with the journey from Libya to Italy or anywhere on European Coasts. It is like a picnic, though they risk hunger, diseases, acute dehydration and high probability of getting lost in a vast space of sand dunes where water, shelter and food are dreams. Nonetheless, their journey from Libya to Europe is incredibly tough, cruel and fatal. In statistic wise it is guessed every two passengers out of five may survive in any journey and the conditions in which they travel are beyond description but the worst part of the journey is crossing the Mediterranean. The number of passengers per a boat In most cases more than 500 passengers. The passengers are forcibly loaded in a boat of 50 passengers capacity to cross unwelcoming waters of Mediterranean within a week or more, depending on the routes taken to avoid surveillance.
It is true that not only the young generations from Darfur are facing their inevitable fate in the Mediterranean but there are also many fleeing their home because of unbearable conditions caused by their dictator rulers in some African States. While many of those are classified into the category of economic migrants, the Migrants from Darfur are not under this category. They are forced to flee their country and seek refuge in other countries like the UK to survive genocide, torture and so many other crimes against humanity. Before the crisis in Darfur rarely a person from Darfur goes abroad for a purpose of remaining there for a long time. Even those who have come to the UK before the date of the crisis, they are very few in comparison to the Sudanese community in the UK and they visited the United Kingdom as students and this type of Darfurians usually go back immediately to their homeland as soon as their scholarship duration is expired.
The number of the Sudanese community in the UK today is not less than 40.000 more than a half are from Darfur and the number is expected to rise unless there is a political settlement that addresses the root causes of the crisis.
The recent approach of some countries in particular EU States to address the issue by offering some incentives to the genociders in Khartoum to combat migration across the desert is implicitly another way of giving a further excuse to commit more crimes against humanity.
It is time for the West to take a bold step in challenging the NCP Regime in Khartoum to uphold the Rule of Law, human rights, and the democratic rights of the people of Darfur as well as other parts of the Sudan and stop brutality for the sake of humanity.