A humanitarian disaster is unfolding right now in the Darfur region of Sudan, and it could be prevented. More than 300,000 people, most of them ethnically African, have been killed in the past two years. Some 3.3 million have been forced to flee into camps as a campaign of terror by Janjaweed militias and the army of the government of Sudan clears large areas of the region. The campaign is co-ordinated and systematic. NGOs that hope to give limited help are themselves subject to intimidation. The latest reports suggest that up to 40 per cent of those designated ethnically African cannot be protected.
Rebels fighting the government have also attacked camps and killed civilians. There is, however, an utter disparity in power and violence perpetrated, between the rebel groups and the government/Janjaweed forces. Moreover, the government deploys an overtly Arab-supremacist ideology, chillingly expressed in Janjaweed chants of “Kill the blacks, kill the slaves”, and evidence exists of written orders from the government “to change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes”.
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