Tag: Darfur genocide

The Final Solution – Now Playing (out) in Darfur

Published on by Susan Burgess-LentLeave a comment

It’s no secret that the Khartoum government has for many years carefully planned, and waited when necessary – they are prodigiously patient – to finish the genocide begun in earnest in 2003 in Darfur.

The perfect storm of “distractions” has finally arrived:  the US election with its tawdry trading of petty allegations, the debacle in Syria, the Olympics – to name a few. Nobody is watching, much less caring, that the “Warsaw ghetto” of Sudan is now being emptied. Though the people who’ve survived nine long years in IDP camps will not be sent to gas chambers, they will be consigned to a similar fate: forced into a forbidding desert with no food, water or shelter.

The recent attacks and looting of Kassab camp signals the Plan is moving forward, either by design or ominous serendipity.

Humanitarian organizations have been systematically forced out of the region. No journalists are permitted in the killing fields. (God bless Radio Dabanga with its network of citizen reporters!).  Communtions are monitored, limited and jammed, Money transfers are nearly impossible. The purported peacekeepers have been intimidated into complete acquiescence. The way is clear for the ultimate destruction of an entire people.

Do we have a political solution? Can we get even political attention to this horror?

Obama has an opportunity NOT to repeat Clinton’s timid and devastatingly consequential dithering in the face of the Rwandan genocide.

Yo! folks in the media!  It’s the big one.

The Nazis of Sudan cannot be allowed their Final Solution.

The Avoidance Word Still Screams its Name

Published on by Susan Burgess-LentLeave a comment

After more than nine years of overt violence and systematic cultural and economic dismemberment, Darfur remains in the grips of genocide, now in its attrition phase. The international community continues its unseemly acquiescence to the Khartoum regime’s travesty of governance.

Although billions of words have been written on this seemingly endless crisis, I never give up on the notion that change will come, that these afflicted people, not just Darfuris but all Sudanese, will yet enjoy the peace and prosperity denied them for generations.

The following is excerpted from a Lecture by Professor Wole Soyinka at the 50th Anniversary of the 1st International Conference of Black Writers & Artists, Paris, September 2006   Soyinka

“As writers, we cannot cease to recognize and embrace our mission oftestifying and laying ambush for escapist minds. Those who are alive today to witness this renewed perfidy [in Darfur], and their successors living or yet unborn in the mission of warning and bearing witness, will not forget. Let words, at the very least, be mobilized towards the fulfillment of responsibilities by those who are charged with the protection of the weak and helpless, the temporarily disadvantaged, let them persist in saying to you, all who hold the primary controls of the direction of a continent’s future, that that future will not forget, nor will it forgive. As the armies of the Sudanese state mass for the final onslaught on its long determined design of race extermination, that future will stigmatise you one and all, will brand youcollaborators and accomplices if you abandon the people of Darfur to this awful fate, one that so blindingly scrawls its name across the supplicating sands and hills of Darfur– Genocide!”

Though I often wish it were possible to “un-know” this horror, I persist, in my own small ways, to work for the critical mass of awareness and commitment that will turn the tide. I believe empowering war-affected women is the key.