Background on the Darfur Genocide

Background on the Darfur Genocide

30- 09- 2006 Entire villages bombed and pillaged; countless women raped; wells poisoned; humanitarian aid blocked; hundreds of thousands murdered and more than 2.5 million civilians displaced---this is the culture of impunity that continues today in Darfur, a region in Western Sudan. Today the region is the site of an ongoing genocide and---according to the UN---the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
The witnesses have horrible stories to tell. This account comes from Amnesty International's report Darfur: Rape as a Weapon of War: "There was also another rape on a young single girl aged 17: M. was raped by six men in front of her house in front of her mother. M's brother, S., was then tied up and thrown into [the] fire."

Since February 2003, the Sudanese government and its proxy Janjaweed militias have been committing mass murder, mass rape, and other kinds of systematic violence against Darfur's civilians. More than 450,000 have been killed. Millions are now either displaced within their own county or cling to life as refugees; the World Food Program estimates that well over 3.5 million need daily food aid in order to survive.
In July 2004, Congress unanimously declared that the situation in Darfur constituted genocide. The Bush administration followed with its own official genocide determination in September 2004. Numerous human rights groups (including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International); international NGOs; bipartisan Congressional coalitions; Christian, Jewish, and Muslim community leaders in our own country---all these have brought attention to the deliberate and widespread ethnic killing of Darfur's African tribes.
This May, the Sudanese government and a Darfuri rebel faction agreed to a U.S.-brokered peace plan, but this agreement is now in tatters (Note 1). The plan requires the Sudanese government to disarm its militias, but instead a marked escalation in attacks has occurred.
September 2006 sees the beginning of a new, massive military campaign brought on by the genocidaires. The government is bombing and razing entire villages, threatening to kill, root out, and displace hundreds of thousands more.
President Bush, the State Department, and a large majority of Republicans and Democrats in Congress support a multinational intervention force to stop the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. But in light of unrelated foreign policy priorities, Darfur risks completely falling off the U.S. agenda. It is up to citizens of conscience around this country to advocate on behalf of the people of Western Sudan.
The U.S. helped to pass a United Nations Security Council resolution on August 31, 2006, authorizing a large and robust United Nations peacekeeping force with a mandate to protect Darfur's civilians. But, because UN deployment to Sudan is still a very uncertain issue, and because any UN mission for Darfur will in any case probably take a long time to hit the ground, the U.S. must help deploy right now a NATO rapid-reaction force to the Darfur region. NATO troops are well-equipped, well-trained, and have already held training exercises in Western Sudan.
The people of Darfur cannot wait any longer. On August 28, 2006, Jan Egeland, head of Humanitarian Affairs for the UN, reported: “I cannot give a starker warning than to say that we are at a point where even hope may escape us and the lives of hundreds of thousands could be needlessly lost."
Note 1: For the past three years, in order to consolidate its political power, the Sudanese government has been fighting against various rebel groups based in Darfur.


Alrabae Adam Ezaldeen
Supervisor of foreign Affairs & General Secretary of Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM/A-A)
In United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland’s Chapter