Sudan killing machine finds a new vicitim

The bombers swoop in from overhead, indiscriminately bombing villages and innocent civilians. Ethnic cleansing continues unabated. 417,000 people have been displaced — so far. No, this is not Syria. This is Sudan, again. You might remember Sudan from such other atrocities as the 20-year north-south civil war that killed 2 million people, and the genocide in Darfur that killed 300,000 and displaced 2.5 million. Now, welcome to South Kordofan, a southern Sudanese province. The targets are the Nuba people. The culprit is the usual one, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the butcher of Sudan, genocidaire par excellence. More than any uprising associated with the Arab Spring, Sudan is the true test to whatever claim we wish to make over our humanitarian ideals, and the oft-cited but less-oft practised Responsibility to Protect. These most recent tensions exploded when a June 2011 election saw Ahmed Haroun elected as governor of South Kordofan, home to the Nuba people. Haroun is wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur and has proven himself one of Bashir’s most loyal practitioners of divide-and-rule and ethnic cleansing. Under the comprehensive peace agreement that ended the civil war, the Nuba were supposed to have a measure of say in their own future given their cultural and ethnic distinction. Such a say never came. Caught on the wrong side of the border between Sudan and South Sudan, the Nuba’s ethnicity makes them closer to those in newly independent South Sudan. For this allegiance they have paid dearly since Haroun was elected and transposed his Darfur playbook into the Nuba mountains. “They say our skin is like charcoal,” a Nuba told NBC’s Ann Curry, who sneaked into the region off-limits to journalists. Read more >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>