Wizblog

From Human Rights Watch...

...a call to "the international community" to pressure the government of Sudan to end the "ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity" in Darfur. From the HRW report, "Sudan: Darfur Destroyed"...

Human Rights Watch spent twenty-five days in and on the edges of West Darfur, documenting abuses in rural areas that were previously well-populated with Masalit and Fur farmers. Since August 2003, wide swathes of their homelands, among the most fertile in the region, have been burned and depopulated. With rare exceptions, the countryside is now emptied of its original Masalit and Fur inhabitants. Everything that can sustain and succour life—livestock, food stores, wells and pumps, blankets and clothing—has been looted or destroyed. Villages have been torched not randomly, but systematically—often not once, but twice.

The uncontrolled presence of Janjaweed in the burned countryside, and in burned and abandoned villages, has driven civilians into camps and settlements outside the larger towns, where the Janjaweed kill, rape, and pillage—even stealing emergency relief items—with impunity.