Sudanese Christians being murdered by muslims

Barbara the Jew:
Sudan's militant Muslim regime is slaughtering Christians who refuse to convert to Islam, according to the head of an aid group who recently returned from the African nation.

The forced conversions are just one aspect of the Khartoum government's self-declared jihad on the mostly Christian and animist south, Dennis Bennett, executive director of Seattle-based Servant's Heart told WorldNetDaily.

Villagers in several areas of the northeast Upper Nile region say that when women are captured by government forces they are asked: "Are you Christian or Muslim?"

Women who answer "Muslim" are set free, but typically soldiers gang-rape those who answer "Christian" then cut off their breasts and leave them to die as an example for others.

Bennett says these stories are corroborated by witnesses from several tribes in the region. Upon returning to the U.S., he wrote a letter to influential members of Congress and activists.

"After witnessing once again the situation on the ground there," Bennett wrote, "I must ask 'How long will the United States government allow the Government of Sudan to continue its jihad against the Black African Christians of South Sudan?'"

Backed by Muslim clerics, the National Islamic Front regime in the Arab and Muslim north declared a jihad, or holy war, on the south in 1989. Since 1983, an estimated 2 million people have died from war and related famine. About 4.5 million have become refugees.

Sudan's holy war against the south was reaffirmed in October by First Vice President Ali Osman Taha.

"The jihad is our way, and we will not abandon it and will keep its banner high," he said to a brigade of mujahedin fighters heading for the war front, according to Sudan's official SUNA news agency. "We will never sell out our faith and will never betray the oath to our martyrs."

StuckInTheSixties:


George Clooney's satellite spies reveal secrets of Sudan's bloody army

Actor and activist funds a hi-tech project that is tracking troops and warning civilians of attacks

Paul Harris in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Saturday 24 March 2012 08.24 EDT

Nathaniel Raymond is the first to admit that he has an unusual job description. "I count tanks from space for George Clooney," said the tall, easygoing Massachusetts native as he sat in a conference room in front of a map of the Sudanese region of South Kordofan.

Close by, pins and ink scrawlings on the map detail the positions of Sudanese army forces and refugee populations in the troubled oil-producing province, where the Sudanese army is carrying out a brutal crackdown.

The wall next to Raymond has a series of satellite images projected on it. At the flick of a mouse, tiny images of tanks and military vehicles hove into view, caught by a satellite hundreds of miles above.

Raymond is director of the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP), which aims to use advanced satellite imagery to monitor potential human rights abuses in Sudan. And it was all Clooney's idea, turning him from just another Hollywood liberal with a pet cause to a genuine expert and campaigner on Sudan. Together with John Prendergast, another campaigner, Clooney has sneaked repeatedly into the country to document the random bombing of civilians and other atrocities.

After a trip last month to the Nuba mountains, Clooney dodged rockets to return with grisly footage of corpses, children with missing hands and entire villages forced to live in caves. He showed the film to the Senate foreign relations committee in Washington DC – to great praise from the assembled politicians – then got arrested at a protest outside the Sudanese embassy.

Images of Clooney being taken away in handcuffs appeared in newspapers and on blogs around the world. But it is in the day-to-day work of the Satellite Sentinel Project that Clooney's impact is really being felt. He came up with the idea, and spoke to Google and the satellite company DigitalGlobe to help set it up, and he donates hefty speaking fees to keep it funded. It has been up and running now for 15 months.

The situation in Sudan is complex and violent. Ever since the mostly-black African South Sudan gained independence from the Arab-dominated north last year border disputes have flared, especially over the region's oil resources. Meanwhile, powerful figures in the north fear that provinces along the southern border with its new neighbour may also seek to break free of Khartoum.

The army crackdown is aimed at discouraging such hopes, or even changing the ethnic mix of the area in favour of those groups who that want to stick with Khartoum.

Based in a nondescript suite of offices near Harvard Square in the Boston suburb of Cambridge, Raymond heads a small team of staff and student volunteers who monitor events on the ground in the heart of what is practically a war zone. Every day Raymond and his staff meet in what is dubbed the "situation room" and news and reports from Sudan are analysed. They also pore over satellite pictures and compare them with a database of previous shots, looking for changes such as new military roads or camps, or troops on the move.

One day last week, SSP staffer Brittany Card was analysing news stories from Sudan describing a governor visiting two camps that were listed as mobilisation points for the People's Defence Force, a militia group widely used in repressive actions by the government. SSP imaging expert Isaac Baker traced out two rectangles to cover each camp. "We don't have a recent collect on that," observed Raymond. Baker began to tap out a request for fresh satellite imagery as Raymond and Card discussed which camp to monitor if only one picture could be taken. "The one on the east," she said eventually. By using such advanced satellite imagery and being able to commission and take photographs within hours of receiving reports from the ground, SSP can genuinely plot and analyse the course of the conflict. "We don't move the pieces on the chess board. But we have to figure out what they mean," said Raymond.

SSP's work was initially conceived as mostly gathering evidence that might be used in any future war crimes tribunal for Sudanese leaders. But the imagery was so accurate that it could also be used to monitor claims about massacres and mass graves. After someone on the ground described watching bodies being buried in a mango grove in the town of Kadugli, SSP was able to document the site from the air. It also uncovered what appeared to be body bags lying in freshly dug pits elsewhere in the town.

It has also shown troops surrounding towns and burned villages. In one astonishing set of images, it even captured an Antonov transport plane – from which Sudanese forces regularly roll out bombs – caught in mid-flight with plumes of smoke rising where the explosives had been dumped on civilian targets.

In September last year, the group's analysis revealed what appeared to be an imminent attack on the town of Kurmuk in the Blue Nile province. Photographs revealed at least 3,000 troops equipped with tanks, artillery and attack helicopters. That prompted SSP to issue a warning, giving an opportunity for many to flee.

For Raymond and his team, it was a turning point: they were no longer just observers, but were able to have an impact. For a humanitarian group operating thousands of miles away from the crisis, this was new territory.

"No one is doing what we are doing right now. It is a splitting the atom moment for the human rights community," said Raymond. However, the experience of Kurmuk – which did later fall to the army – also came with a sense of danger and great responsibility. "What if we get the direction the force is going wrong? You could have walked the civilian population right into them," he said.

There is already talk of the group's methods being applied to Syria, or to other nations caught in the turmoil unleashed by the Arab spring. It has overturned the idea of what investigating human rights abuses means.

"It is no longer enough just to stand at the graveside snapping pictures; that doesn't cut it any more," said Raymond.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/24/george-clooney-spies-secrets-sudan






Another view, same source:

George Clooney isn't helping Sudan

Clooney's well-meaning activism for the Nuba mountain people is rooted in a political culture that does not care for nuance

Nesrine Malik
Monday 19 March 2012 08.48 EDT

What does one immediately associate with Sudan? Darfur, allegations of genocide, a president indicted by the international criminal court and a mistreated south seceding from the north of the country. And now, George Clooney.

As Clooney and his cohorts were arrested for their protest outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington DC on Friday, the preoccupation seemed to be not with the suffering of the Nuba mountain people (the cause Clooney was advocating for), but with celebrity activism. Stars are hoist by their own petard, in that they bring their star factor, but little gravitas, and it is excruciating listening to Clooney's beauty pageant contestant responses to what is actually going on in Sudan. But he's an actor, not a political expert or an academic. He wants to save lives. But how much impact does the US have on the Sudanese government? Very little at best. International involvement that is all stick and no carrot can be counterproductive.

But let's be fair to Clooney, and look beyond the snide comments and the jokes. It is admirable that he is willing to dedicate his time, health and resources to an issue he feels strongly about. I don't doubt that he is earnest. But it has rubbed Sudanese – the most important interlocutors – up the wrong way. The eye-rolling offence that most Sudanese took at this latest incident doesn't mean that they are necessarily fans of the government in Khartoum, but that they have a deep-seated suspicion of US selective moral outrage.

As a Sudanese, I am concerned not because I would like foreigners to stay out of internal affairs, but because the view Clooney is presenting to the world is not an accurate one. This is not out of any deliberate manipulation on his part, but Clooney's campaign is rooted in a political culture that does not care for nuance.

It all really goes deeper than the criticism aimed at his Enough Project, the Save Darfur campaign, or the "genocide paparazzi" satellite monitoring scheme – all of which are symptomatic of an overarching failure in US foreign policy, which promotes a black-and-white understanding of some situations, often underscored by moral superiority. After all, "Arabs are genocidally massacring blacks in the Nuba mountains" is far sexier and easier to digest than "the people of the Nuba mountains sided with the Southern People's Liberation Movement during Sudan's decades-long civil war between north and south, and after the secession of the south last year, a disgruntled SPLM candidate for governor lost what he believed were rigged elections and then took arms against the government in Khartoum in co-operation with the residual Nuba SPLM cadre, whose grievances had still not been addressed".

Clooney stated that the situation in the Nuba mountains was a "man-made tragedy by the government in Khartoum to get these people to leave". It is nothing of the sort. Khartoum is responding to a rebellion in the region (where the SPLM's agitating role is problematic to say the least) with little strategy and mass clumsy bombings, rolling makeshift oil drums full of explosives out of planes. It is apathetic to civilian deaths and not concerned with wiping out inhabitants of the Nuba mountains. This does not make the situation any less desperate, but it is an event that cannot be addressed in isolation from the conditions and provocations that precipitated it.

Sudan Change Now, a Sudanese opposition movement, published a letter to Clooney today stating :

"Portraying the regional conflicts in the country as a simplified war of Arabs and Africans concerns us. It does not fully capture the historical and political aspects of the conflict considering that the Sudanese government is a dictatorship and does not reflect the sentiments of the majority of the people. The regional conflicts in Sudan are not simple and are highly political with a strong basis on economic gains such as oil and other resources."

Rob Crilly of the Telegraph is correct when he writes: "The problem is that his campaign stems from the same misguided analysis that brought us Kony 2012. It is an analysis that reduces Africa to simple notions of good versus evil, and suggests that outsiders hold the key to finding solutions". Sudan is a country where a plethora of issues – such as tribal grazing rights, water availability, diversity of ethnicities and border demarcations – contribute to conflict. The situation is inflamed by decades of entrenched centralisation on the part of successive governments in Khartoum that have alienated the peripheries. Rebellion flares up in and is doused regularly, with fundamental grievances never addressed.

The current government in Sudan is not a benign one, and it might appear churlish not to support an out-and-out condemnation of its actions. But identifying the true nature of the problem enables us to come up with the right solutions. I would urge Clooney to team up with and extend resources to partners in Sudan who can influence the situation internally. It is his best chance of fulfilling his wish of ending up on the "right side of history".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/19/george-clooney-isnt-helping-sudan

Note that the first article is a news article, while the second is commentary.


A thought:

For whatever reasons, Clooney's involvement in this issue, and the publicity he brought to it, probably made more people aware of the issue than any other single factor. I can't see that that would be a bad thing.

LilMissAlexandria: i dont understand their right to enter south sudan south sudan is independent