In our silence we are complicit
“The Janjaweed arrived and asked me to leave the place. They beat women and small children. They killed a little girl, Sara Bishara. She was two years old. She was knifed in her back.” Aisha Ali, from the village of Sasa, in North Darfur Darfur has been embroiled in a deadly conflict for four years today. At least 400.000 people have been killed; more than 2 million innocent civilians have been forced to flee their homes and now live in displaced-persons camps in Sudan or in refugee camps in neighbouring Chad; and more than 3.5 million men, women and children are completely reliant on international aid for survival. Not since the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has the world seen such a calculated campaign of displacement, starvation, rape, and mass slaughter. Since early 2003, Sudanese armed forces and Sudanese gouvernement-backed militia known as “Janjaweed” have been fighting two rebel groups in Darfur. The stated political aim of the rebels has been to compel the gouvernment of Sudan to address underdevelopment and the political marginalization of the region. In response, the Sudanese gouvernment’s regular armed forces and the Janjaweed have targeted civilian populations. Since the beginning of last year, the violence has escalated, with in-fighting among the various rebel groups and factions dramatically increasing. In August 2006, the UN’s top humanitarian official Jan Egeland stated that the situation in Darfur is “going from real bad to catastrophic”. International experts agree that the United Nations Security Council must deploy a peace-keeping force with a mandate to protect civilians immediately. Until it arrives, the under-funded and overwhelmed African Union monitoring mission must be bolstered. And gouvernments and international institutions must be able to provide and ensure access to sufficient humanitarian aid for those in need.