President of the Sudan Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir has a long history as a war criminal.
With other current and past members of the Islamic Sudanese regime, he was an active participant from the beginning in a twenty year long campaign of anihilation waged against the Animist and Christian South Sudanese. In the early 1980s, he and his Northern Arabic Muslim chums decided to impose the delights of sharia law on all the Sudanese. When the Southerners resisted they became the victims of rape, torture, murder and forced conversions to Islam on an industrial scale. Half way through this holocaust, Omar did a putsch and made himself President going on to prosecute the jollyness in the South with renewed and merciless fury. By the time in 2004 when the desperate and heroic resistance of the South had forced him accept a truce, 2 million Animists and Christians had been butchered.
While the mass murder of black Animists and Christians hadn't much bothered the International Community, what really got Omar into trouble was when in 2004/2005 he loosened his genocidal hordes on rebellious black Darfuri Muslims. Big Hoo-Ha and the issuing in 2008 and 2010 by the International Criminal Court of arrest warrants for Omar and members of his clique on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The lot. Unsurprisingly, most Islamic states and organizations denounced the warrants as neocolonialism. What it means is that Omar has been welcomed as a hero in the Islamic world but has to think twice about getting his dentures fixed in Switzerland. The toll in Darfur now stands at 200,000 killed and twice that number ethnically cleansed out of the country into neighboring Chad.
In the meantime, the truce in the South had led to a referendum and the partition of the Sudan with the creation of the world's newest state called South Sudan. This brings us to the present.
The border between North and South Sudan, which in some sections is disputed and runs through valuable oil fields, left several non- Muslim tribes, notably the Nubas, marooned within the Islamic Northern State. When border disputes flared, the Nubas took the side of their Southern co-religionists. For this the Nubas are now being subjected to the usual Northern Arab Muslim obliteration campaign. Their defenseless villages are being razed by bombing and shelling and the International Community is once again turning a blind eye. Well trying to.
Enter George Clooney who with John Prendergast set up the Satellite Sentinel Project which " combines commercial satellite imagery, academic analysis and advocacy to promote human rights in Sudan and South Sudan and serve as an early warning system for impending crises." With reporters on the ground and eye in the sky high resolution satellite film and photography, they can often see in real time what the villains are up to. Most recently, Sentsat have warned of a build up of Northern troops, artillery, tanks, bombers and helicopter gunships heading for the South. They have also reported the indiscriminate bombing by the North Sudanese airforce of villages in the border provinces. Of particular concern are current encirclement maneuvers cutting civilian escape routes from targeted areas of the Nuba mountains; clearly the preludes to total massacres. Clooney, who spent some time on the ground seeing first hand what the Northerners were doing to civilians, was arrested last March in Washington protesting about the outrages outside the Sudan's Embassy. It made the news.
Omar and the other Muslim perps may not be stopped quite yet but they are going to find it increasingly hard to hide their crimes. Well done George !
Lest I get accused of having a 100% jaundiced view of Muslims, let me add that I know that fighting alongside atheists, Animists and Christians there are a few Muslims who want to create in Southern Sudan a humane and tolerant society.
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