GENOCIDE WARNING: SUDAN’S SILENT GENOCIDE, OUR SOUNDS OF SILENCE, Nov. 2000

GENOCIDE WARNING: SUDAN’S SILENT GENOCIDE, OUR SOUNDS OF SILENCE

By Gregory H. Stanton, November 2000

Genocide is not a word to use lightly. It is an accusation of the worst of all crimes against humanity -- mass murder. It ranks the accused with Hitler and the Rwandan militias.

Since 1983, 1.9 million people have died in the southern Sudan and the Nuba mountains. But have their deaths been the result of genocide? Or have they been the unintended results of a civil war that has brought with it terrible suffering and starvation?

Sudanese government troops and government-trained and armed militias have systematically committed every other war crime and crime against humanity -- from bombing clearly marked hospitals and schools to enslavement of scores of thousands of southern Sudanese. But such horrible crimes would not necessarily constitute genocide.

The Genocide Convention defines genocide as “the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Although killing of political enemies may be mass murder, it is not genocide.

Have the deaths been the result of intentional Sudanese government policy to destroy certain ethnic, racial and religious groups? The evidence is now in. A careful study of the historical record conducted by Dr. Millard Burr for the U.S. Committee for Refugees has gathered overwhelming proof that the 1.9 million deaths resulted from the intended policy of the National Islamic Front government of Sudan.

Burr’s lengthy report, entitled “Quantifying Genocide in Southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains 1983-1998,” demonstrates conclusively that the Sudanese government has systematically withheld permission to international relief agencies to bring food to starving southern Sudanese; that it has armed tribal militias to commit mass murder against rival ethnic groups; and it has bombed civilians in order to spread terror and depopulate vast areas, resulting in mass death.

There are two ways to prove intent. One is to get direct evidence of orders from documents or eyewitness testimony. The other is to show a pattern that is so systematic, so consistent that it must be by design. If its leaders are ever tried before an international tribunal, direct orders may surface. But the pattern is clear. Sudanese government refusal to permit relief flights to famine-struck areas has been obdurate at the crucial moments when the aid is most needed, when the greatest number of deaths would result. A case in point was the man-made famine in Bahr al-Ghazal province in 1998 that killed at least 70,000 Dinka after the Khartoum government bombed and terrorized 700,000 people into leaving their homes and then refused landing rights for international relief flights.

The genocide committed against the Nuba people may be the worst case, but it is the least known because the government has barred journalists and international personnel from the Nuba mountains. The Nuba, perhaps the blackest-skinned people on earth, were grouped into “Peace Villages,” where their women were systematically raped by Arab men, their children stolen to serve as slaves, and at least 100,000 people “disappeared,” never to be seen again.

The Genocide Convention does not require the killing of a whole group. Part of a group is enough. Acts other than direct killing also constitute genocide: “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The Sudanese government has committed all of these acts.

Were these crimes committed against people because they are members of particular ethnic, racial, or religious groups? Again, the evidence is now in. The targeted groups are ethnic: the black African groups of southern Sudan (Dinka, Nuer, and Shilluk) and the Nuba. The genocide is racial: the victims are invariably black Africans. It is also religious: Christians have been massacred. Christian churches, hospitals, and schools have been bombed and destroyed.

What are the motives for this genocide? They include political domination over a region that has always been governed separately, as well as religious conversion of infidels. But a new and powerful motive has now been added. The southern Sudan contains some of the world’s largest untapped oil deposits. Chinese, Malaysian, and Canadian oil companies are now starting to pump billions into the Sudanese government treasury. To exploit the oilfields, the government must control the territory around them. To do that, the government intends to empty the land of local peoples. There is nowhere to move them. So genocide has become Sudanese government policy.

More people have died in the Sudanese genocide than in any other since the Holocaust. But few Americans know about it. It is not on the nightly news or in most newspapers. Few call it by its proper name. The time has come to end our silence and call it genocide.