A Year of Bombs and Silence

For twelve months the Nuba Mountain people of Sudan’s South Kordofan State have been under genocidal attack by Sudan’s National Congress Party (NCP) government, the Islamist regime of ICC-indicted war criminal, Omar al-Bashir. The year’s toll on the 50+ indigenous African people groups that comprise the Nuba has been just as the regime desired. Over half a million people are at imminent risk of death from disease, starvation, and thirst, orchestrated deliberately by Bashir. And in the face of this genocide, the Obama Administration has been silent in every significant sense, refusing to take decisive action, uttering meaningless statements of concern, and tainting even those useless expressions by treating as morally equivalent the genocidal regime in Khartoum and those who are fighting against it to defend their people.

On Sunday, June 5, 2011, sources on the ground first reported that war had begun in the Nuba Mountains. A rigged election gave South Kordofan governorship to ICC-indicted war criminal Ahmed Haroun over the popular Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) war hero, Commander Abdelaziz Adam Al Hilu. Haroun demanded the disarming and expulsion of the SPLA from the region. Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and militias began deploying troops with heavy weapons, tanks, and a military air base. The Nuba division of the SPLA, now known as the SPLA-North, began to fight back against the SAF. Only in the air did Khartoum have the advantage. "We need quick action from the USA and the international community before another genocide occurs in the Nuba Mountains,” Nuba watchers warned.

Since that time, the SAF has bombed continually Nuba Mountain farm villages, burning homes, schools, and churches. Khartoum’s bombers fly daily over the region and with random cruelty drop barrel bombs stuffed with ball bearings, nails, and other deadly projectiles. The regime’s Islamist militia, the "Popular Defense Force,” Murahaliin of the Arab Baggara tribe, waged the ground war against the civilians while the SPLA-North was occupied in battle with the SAF. The militia staged house by house purges of black, African Nuba, particularly targeting church leaders and members. Khartoum also began waging war against the disputed Blue Nile State in September 2011, sacking the freely and fairly elected governor, Malik Agar, and killing civilians. Over 30,000 Nuba have fled to South Sudanese and Kenyan refugee camps. But the bombers ignore sovereign borders and occasionally attack there as well. (...)