Children's drawings from
There is a Sudanese Arabized-African girl, Kizzie, whom we have in Blogpower and both Pommygranate and I were instrumental in getting her in. I've had a correspondence with her in which I asked her to address the points below, from various articles, which today I've collated into some sort of order.
The Arab coverage of
She has gone away for some days to collect her thoughts and then she's going to post her take on
She has told me there are many lies told in the western media about
First,
First thing to keep in mind is that
Second: the GIA [Arab killing militsia] is not just a few loonies. It'd be nice to believe that, but it's just not true. The GIA has at least 15,000 soldiers. You can't feed and supply that many men without cooperation from the civilian population.
The war got even sicker as it went on. My personal favorite for coolest group of crazies is this GIA splinter group I read about - the Disciples of Satan. Sounds like a biker gang, but these guys make the Hell's Angels look like a book club.
Some formed a new group called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (you gotta love that name!) which tried to be "good" guerrillas, sticking to military targets and not killing civilians unnecessarily.
"We pledge allegiance to Sheikh Osama Bin Laden... We will pursue our jihad in Algeria. Our soldiers are at his call so that he may strike who and where he likes," said the statement, signed by Abu Mossaab Abdelwadud, the emir of the group.
Now to
Since 2003, when war broke out between the Sudanese Government and Darfuri rebels, about 200,000 civilians have died. Another 2.5 million, a third of
Steidle had never seen anything like it – schoolgirls, bound together with makeshift handcuffs and burned alive. He was shocked, then outraged, then intrigued. He wanted to see for himself.
In January, he predicted – based on Janjaweed movements – that the town of
He returned to the
The Janjaweed militias do not act alone. I have seen clear evidence that the atrocities committed in
Attacks are well coordinated by Sudanese government officials and Arab militias, who attack villages together. Before these attacks occur, the cell phone systems are shut down by the government so that villagers cannot warn each other.
Helicopter gunships belonging to the government routinely support the Arab militias on the ground. The gunships fire anti-personnel rockets that contain flashettes, or small nails, each with stabilizing fins on the back so the point hits the target first.
Each gunship contains four rocket pods, each rocket pod contains about 20 rockets and each rocket contains about 500 of these flashettes. Flashette wounds look like shotgun wounds.
I saw one small child's back that looked as if it had been shredded by a cheese grater. We got him to a hospital, but we did not expect him to live.
On forced relocation by the Sudanese government
First it would announce the need to relocate an IDP camp and assess the population of displaced people, often grossly underestimating the numbers. Then after international aid organizations had built a new, smaller camp, the government would forcibly relocate the population, leaving hundreds to thousands without shelter.
It would bulldoze or drive over the old camps with trucks, often in the middle of the night in order to escape notice. It would then gather up and burn the remaining debris.
At the edge of the village, I found a Sudanese general who explained why he was doing nothing to stop the looting and burning. He said his job was to protect civilians and keep the road open to commercial traffic and denied that his men were participating in the attack.
Then a group of uniformed men drove by in a Toyota Land Cruiser. The general said they were just going to get water, but they stopped about
A proposed United Nations force of about 20,000 -- over three times the size of the African Union's -- has been blocked by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who says it is part of an effort by Western nations to "re-colonize" Sudan.
The government also has failed to restrain the Janjaweed, which continues to rape, kill and pillage. Increasingly, the militiamen are doing so while wearing crisp green uniforms, distributed by the government.
Civilians here say militiamen gallop their horses and camels into the camps for displaced people, sometimes within site of African Union troop positions. Rarely have the troops responded with force.
Oxfam take on the matter
However, according to Adrian McIntyre, Oxfam's spokesman in Sudan, atrocities have continued:
"There is a certain low-level violence against individuals that is absolutely pervasive in Darfur," he said. The harassment, the beatings, the robbery, the rape, the murder continues on a daily basis and unfortunately it continues well below the radar screen of the international media and of the international diplomatic machine."
Google Earth makes denial more difficult
The new initiative, called "Crisis in
More than 1,600 damaged and destroyed villages will be visible, as will the remnants of more than 100,000 homes, schools, mosques and other structures destroyed by the Janjaweed militia and Sudanese forces.
In nutshell, viewers can see for themselves the extent of burning villages and decide whether to believe or not the Sudnaese governmetn's insistence that these are just sporadic incidents.
The pictures at the top show children's reconstructions of the burning of a village and the rapes of women and children by the "men in green". Can a child's recollections be trusted, if someone directly challenges that and says it never happened or has been grossly exaggerated?
