Secular Café: Bombs still falling in Sudan, while the world looks away

Secular Café For serious discussion of politics, political news, policy, political theory and economics and events happening round the world

Bombs still falling in Sudan, while the world looks away Apr 6th 2012, 03:32 Sudanese leader Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir, accused by the ICC of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, continues to enjoy the support of the Muslim regimes that make up the OIC, and consequently gets away with everything. See this report http://www.spiegel.de/international/...825573,00.html Quote: No one knows Gidel, a dusty little place, and hardly anyone knows South Kordofan or the Nuba Mountains. South Kordofan, nearly twice as large as Austria, forms a sort of buffer state, its territory belonging to Sudan but directly bordering South Sudan, an independent country since last July. It's a fertile region, rich in minerals -- and oil. And perhaps there would be no reason to know about South Kordofan if it weren't currently the site of a drama similar to the one unfolding in Syria: a dictator, an undeclared war, a population taken hostage, bombs and grenades that target primarily civilians. But there are no bloggers in the Nuba Mountains, no YouTube videos, no media-savvy rebels. This war is taking place largely away from the world's eyes. A recent protest in Washington, at which Hollywood star George Clooney was briefly arrested, did little to change the situation... ...Al-Bashir's government, on the other hand, has always neglected the development of the Nuba Mountains. There are no roads, hardly any schools, no healthcare. None of the income from the region's gushing oil reserves ever makes it back to South Kordofan, because people in the Nuba Mountains aren't proper Arabs, because they eat pork and sometimes drink alcohol, and because they demonstrated sympathy for South Sudan's autonomy... ...Now al-Bashir is waging war against them. The president's preferred method is to operate from the air, with bombs designed to fragment on impact... ...Many thousands of people have fled south from the Nuba region. There are 30,000 refugees stranded just in the dusty border town of Yida, between Sudan and South Sudan. Others have retreated to the mountains, where they seek shelter from the bombs in caves or under rock ledges. Politically, the situation is at a standstill. Geographically and according to the 1956 borders drawn by the British that still form the basis for the north-south divide, South Kordofan belongs to the North. But Khartoum has never valued the Nuba region's residents. For centuries, the Arabs used them as slaves, and made no investments in the region. The area served as a buffer between North and South in a civil war that dragged on for 23 years.

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