A Grim Anniversary in Sudan

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Beja, Brad Phillips, Commander Abdelaziz Adam al Hilu, Darfur, ethnic cleansing, Faith J. H. McDonnell, genocide, Jihad, Kadugli, Khartoum, Nuba Mountains, Nuba people, Nubians, Obama Administration, Omar al-Bashir, Persecution Project, racism, South Sudan, SPLA-North, Sudan Government, U.S. State Department

Photo courtesy of Operation Broken Silence, taken in the Nuba Mountains, May 2013, during an End Nuba Genocide coalition relief operation.

By Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

“The students go to class, and when they hear the Antonovs coming they run to hide in the caves.”

This is how a teacher describes a typical school day for children in Acheron, a village in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan State. With the Nuba Mountains now entering a third year of genocidal jihad waged by the Sudanese National Congress Party (NCP) government in Khartoum, the young teacher says “war bombardment has become normal.” “Class” is gathering in the open air. School buildings have gone the same way as those in the first genocide in the 1990’s: bombed to smithereens by Khartoum. But the desire to learn remains alive, and so two volunteer teachers – barely out of secondary school themselves – are risking their own lives to ensure that Nuba children receive an education.

In May 2011 the Islamist regime stole South Kordofan’s gubernatorial election from Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) war hero Commander Abdelaziz Adam al Hilu and gave it to ICC-indicted war criminal Ahmed Haroun. Providing voter statistics showing a clear al Hilu victory, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) for South Kordofan wrote to the UN Security Council on May 20, 2011, saying, “We participated in these elections genuinely, but the NCP proved the lacking of the will to implement any agreement.” The SPLM warned, “The aim of the NCP is to bluff the world and use elections to gain fake legitimacy.”

June 5, 2013 marked the second anniversary of Khartoum’s second jihad against the black, African Nuba people. On June 5, 2011, Sudanese president ICC-indicted war criminal Omar al Bashir launched a genocidal jihad against the Nuba in the state capital of Kadugli. Khartoum’s security forces began house-to-house searches for Christians and other non-Muslims, ethnic black African Nuba, and members of or sympathizers with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) or other opposition parties.

Persecution Project Foundation (PPF) founder and president Brad Phillips told the US Congress that “more than 5,000 ethnic Nubans who sought refuge in the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) compound were dragged out by NCP security forces and slaughtered at the gate while Egyptian UNMIS forces watched and in some reports actually laughed.” Images provided by the Satellite Sentinel Project and internal UN reports reveal that the bodies of thousands of innocent Nuba men, women, and children lie in mass graves around Kadugli.

This was only the beginning. In the 1980’s-‘90’s the Khartoum regime attempted to eradicate the Nuba for aligning with the SPLA. Following the ethnic cleansing of Kadugli, the regime began a similar eradication campaign featuring aerial bombardment and a ground war by the Islamist militia Popular Defense Force (PDF) to burn homes, schools, churches, markets and crops. This scorched earth strategy is responsible for malnutrition and starvation that has affected tens of thousands. Nuba who have not fled to refugee camps in South Sudan or Kenya must flee to caves in the sides of the hills when the daily bombing takes place. Most have no food but leaves and insects, and little access to clean drinking water. The Sudanese government prevents international provision of aid to those in desperate need of food and medicine.

In his congressional testimony, Brad Phillips criticized the US and other governments’ inaction and surmised that if not for the protection of the SPLA-North, “led by their inspirational leader, Abdelaziz Adam Al Hilu, we would be witnessing another Rwandan-style genocide.” Instead, for two years, we have witnessed Sudanese style genocide – in which those committing genocide have seen no evidence that they need to fear meaningful outside intervention.

From Day One the evil intentions of the al Bashir regime were far clearer than those of either Egypt’s Mubarak or Libya’s Gadhafi. And the intensity of the regime’s attack against innocent Nuba civilians far surpassed the Mubarak and Gadhafi responses to Arab “Spring.” Nevertheless, today Mubarak is gone, thanks to President Obama’s intervention, and an Islamist supremacist Muslim Brotherhood controls Egypt without having had to fight for “freedom.” Gadhafi is dead, and thanks to US intervention, the “freedom fighters” that sodomized and murdered him and that attacked the American consulate in Benghazi, are free to impose Sharia on all of Libya. Likewise, the US is poised to provide weapons to yet more Islamists in Syria.

In contrast, over 750 days after the Khartoum regime announced its plan to eradicate the black, African Nuba, to “sweep out the trash” that the racist Arabist regime considers black-skinned African people to be, not only does the genocide continue, but the US State Department still insists that only a “diplomatic solution” will bring peace to Sudan. With such a response from the Obama Administration, it is not surprising that Khartoum has felt free to expand the genocide to Blue Nile State, starting in September 2011, and to ramp up the action against the innocent men, women, and children of Darfur once again.

The SPLA-North and its Darfuri allies fight as the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), winning almost all of the ground battles with the more well-armed regime. AFP reported on April 27, 2013 that the “rebels” had attacked five government-held areas in North and South Kordofan States. They quoted an anonymous regional political expert who said that the rebel action is aimed to demonstrate strength and is “very threatening for the government.” So threatening, in fact, that the regime went whining to the international community, and particularly to the US government, demanding condemnation of the attacks and sanctions on the rebel-controlled regions. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the Obama Administration denounced the SRF’s actions, even though, in the words of Brad Phillips, “it is US coddling of Bashir that has ultimately forced the SPLM-N to action before their people are further ground down by famine and privation.”

The State Department has encouraged the SRF to become more “inclusive” of all so-called opposition groups, including those that share the regime’s dream of an Islamic Caliphate. But State has shown less concern for the inclusion of hundreds of thousands of Sudan’s other ethnic African people groups. In Sudan’s far north, home to more pyramids than exist in Egypt, the regime is building dams to drown the memory of the ancient Nubian kingdoms and to displace today’s Nubians, selling their land to Islamists from Egypt. In eastern Sudan, Khartoum has marginalized and oppressed the indigenous Beja people for decades, and is pushing them into the desert, allowing Rashaida Arabs to claim the region.

Recently, Brad Philllips wrote that the “US government and International Community (IC) have responded to all the death, all the torture, all the rape, all the indiscriminate bombings, all the cruelty, all the displacement, and all the persecution by continuing to endorse the very government committing these acts.” He acknowledges some international sanctions still in place against Khartoum, and that “there has been diplomatic wrist-slapping when Bashir’s behavior is simply too atrocious to be ignored.” But Bashir “has successfully convinced the US and IC that any alternative to his administration would plunge the nation into chaos and Sudan would become another Somalia.”

Phillips continues that his response to the “it could be worse” argument is “stunned silence.” He says that all he can see in his mind “are 3 million corpses, thousands of children missing limbs, untold thousands of women raped, and a completely failed state being propped up by an International Community which fears something ‘worse’.”  But something worse is exactly what we have wrought in Egypt and Libya, and to which we seem headed in Syria. Something worse is when a country becomes more like Sudan.

This article originally appeared on Front Page Magazine and was reposted with permission.

Obama Administration to Welcome Genocidal Sudanese Leaders for Talks

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Act for Sudan, Blue Nile State, Darfur, diplomacy, Faith J. H. McDonnell, genocide, ghost houses, ICC indicted war criminal, Islamism, Jihad, Khartoum, moral equivalence, Nafie Ali Nafie, National Congress Party, NCP, Nuba Mountains, Obama, Obama Administration, Omar al-Bashir, South Sudan, State Department, Sudan, terrorism, torture

By Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

In a makeshift shelter of plastic tarps in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, an American linguist, Deborah Martin, interviewed dozens of Darfurian refugees. The year was 2006, and some two thousand Darfurians had fled the Islamist Sudanese regime’s genocidal war against them and walked over 900 miles to the Nuba Mountains. At that time, just after the signing of the 2005 North/South peace agreement, the area now once again a killing field of the Islamist regime was relatively safe.

One young Darfuri woman told Martin she had witnessed the rest of her family, including her 80 year-old grandmother, “sliced up like meat” by the Janjaweed (Arab militia). Other refugees had similarly horrific tales. And common among all the testimonies were four names – either whispered in terror or spat out in defiance. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, Vice President Ali Osman Taha, Arab Janjaweed militia leader Musa Hilal, and former Chief of National Intelligence and Security Services/presidential advisor Nafie Ali Nafie – these were the men they held responsible for the Darfur genocide, and for the regime’s atrocities far beyond Darfur.

Today, the Obama Administration has invited Dr. Nafie Ali Nafie and other high-level officials from Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party (NCP) to Washington, DC. State Department spokeswoman Hilary Renner defended the visit as the opportunity for a “candid discussion on the conflicts and humanitarian crises within Sudan.” But in the Sudanese press, the NCP crowed that the invitation is a call “for the development of relationships between Sudan and the U.S.” Nafie assured his fellow hardliners that he was not going to the U.S. in order to discuss Sudan issues, saying that the regime knew what it was doing in that regard. Writing of the visit Rabbi David Kaufman, founder and co-chair of “Help Nuba,” said it was similar to inviting Heinrich Himmler to the U.S. to discuss the “humanitarian crisis” during the Holocaust.

Nafie eschewed training in plant genetics (he studied at UC Riverside, receiving a Ph.D. in 1980, thank you, USA!) for training in terrorism. According to the Sudan Tribune, Nafie travelled to Tehran in 1981 “on the apparent pretext of conducting further studies in the field of agriculture.” During the 1980’s, he also spent time in Afghanistan and the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon where he gained the expertise and contacts to develop Sudan’s own security apparatus, import weapons, and establish secret desert training camps. The Sudan Tribune says that it is also believe that during this time, Nafie coordinated with his former Iranian mentors “to supply arms to those opposing the American and French presence in Somalia.”

As Chief of National Intelligence and Security Services for Omar al-Bashir’s National Islamic Front regime, Nafie perfected the art of torture. Sudanese Online says, “Dr. Nafie is by far the most brutal security official the Sudan has ever seen.” And the Sudan Tribune explains that he is notorious for the creation of Sudan’s “ghost houses” (buyut al-ashbah), unofficial detention and torture chambers run by Sudan’s security services.

Typical ghost house treatment was given to Nafie’s old colleague from the University of Khartoum, science professor and human rights activist, Farouk Mohammed Ibrahim. Ibrahim was arrested and taken blindfolded to a Khartoum ghost house where he was held for 12 days with no charges. According to his statement seeking redress from the Sudanese government, Ibrahim revealed he “was subjected to interrogations about courses taught and about colleagues.” During the interrogations, he “was repeatedly kicked, beaten and flogged, subjected to a prolonged bath in ice water, threatened with rape and death and deprived of sleep for up to three days.” Ibrahim told the Los Angeles Times that Nafie “was administering the whole thing. He did it all in such a cool manner, as if he were sipping a coffee.”

Condemning the upcoming visit and urging that Secretary Kerry rescind the invitation, Sudan advocacy alliance Act for Sudan noted that Nafie “helped design the regime’s strategy to eliminate or expel indigenous African people by bombing, attacking, raping, and starving innocent civilians. Sudanese Online adds, “Dr. Nafie has expelled international aid agencies from eastern Sudan, Nuba Mountains of Kordofan, Darfur and Blue Nile provinces.”

Recently, Nafie, who is also the deputy chairman of the ruling National Congress Party, addressed a graduation ceremony of the paramilitary Popular Defense Forces (PDF), the jihadists used by Khartoum to conduct the purge of black, African people in the Nuba Mountains. He said of those in Sudan who want equality for all Sudanese and a secular democracy, that they “are traitors for collaborating with rebels to overthrow the regime, and for preaching a secular system.” The opposition “has dug its own grave” by rejecting “the principles of Islamic Sharia law” and seeking to “establish a secular state like the Western countries,” he declared. He vowed to the graduating PDF members that 2013 will be a decisive year in which they would wage a war like that fought by Mohammed at the Battle of Badr, a battle that ushered in the beginning of Islamic expansion.

The Obama Administration is not happy about the backlash it is receiving because of the invitation to Nafie Ali Nafie. Perhaps it has forgotten how frequently Senator Barack Obama and his supporters criticized President George W. Bush’s Sudan policy. Bush’s policies merely saved hundreds of thousands threatened by starvation and disease, brought about the Nuba Mountains ceasefire, created a presidential-level Sudan Special Envoy, and helped to bring about a peace agreement leading to the establishment of the nation of South Sudan. But since he couldn’t bring perform the additional miracle of ending the genocide in Darfur, Obama accused the Bush Administration of not doing enough.

For example, speaking about Darfur in October 2004, Senator Obama said, “There must be real pressure placed on the Sudanese government. We know from past experience that it will take a great deal to get them to do the right thing.” Where is that pressure today, when an architect of genocide is invited to Washington, DC?

In a February 2006 speech on Darfur, Obama confided that “for more than a year now, I’ve been working with other Senators to see what we can do to really push the Administration to take this as seriously as it warrants.” (Emphasis added). He was disturbed that “the United States government seems to be backing off a little bit, the commitment that it made to deal with the problem.” Today, many Sudan activists are disturbed. Members of Congress, including U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), have written to the President, questioning his overarching Sudan policy.

Finally, in April 2008, with the Presidential election drawing closer, Obama again criticized Bush Sudan policy, saying, “I am deeply concerned by reports that the Bush Administration is negotiating a normalization of relations with the Government of Sudan.” He warned that “this reckless and cynical initiative would reward a regime in Khartoum that has a record of failing to live up to its commitments.”

Today, in justifying the invitation to Nafie, the Obama Administration challenges the idea that a trip to America for diplomatic discussion can be considered a “reward.” And it posits only three alternatives in U.S. Sudan policy: go to war with Sudan, engage in diplomacy, or be irrelevant. But there could be another alternative for U.S. Sudan policy. In his book, The Coming Revolution, Dr. Walid Phares advises the U.S. government to support the freedom and democracy-loving sections of civil society within totalitarian and Islamist regimes to foster democratic transformation. In the case of Sudan, the U.S. government could also quietly support the opposition forces that want regime change and a free, equal Sudan. In fact, Senator Barack Obama mentioned this possibility in his 2004 speech when he said that we should be “providing resources . . . including logistical support like airplanes, helicopters, trucks, and other resources that are needed to deliver humanitarian aid.”

But although the Obama Administration was willing to take strong actions to bring about the downfall of Egypt’s Mubarak and Libya’s Qaddafi, (and facilitate the takeover by Islamists) in this case, when the downfall of the regime could mean the downfall of the Islamist agenda in Sudan and the wider region, it prefers diplomatic engagement. Could that not be construed as a “reckless and cynical initiative”? Bringing Dr. Nafie Ali Nafie and other high-level officials of the Sudanese government to Washington, DC threatens to once again reward a regime that not only continues to have a record of failing to live up to its commitments and of committing brutal atrocities against its own citizens, but of pursuing an agenda of global jihad and Islamist supremacism.

This blog post originally appeared on the Front Page Magazine website as an article and is reposted with permission.

Refuge, Identity, and Nightmares: The Nuba in Yida Refugee Camp

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Blue Nile State, disease, Faith J. H. McDonnell, genocide, Government of Sudan, Islamists, Khartoum, Nuba Mountains, South Sudan, starvation, trauma, Yida Refugee Camp

(Photo Credit: The Niles, Bonifacio Taban) Refugees in Yida Camp

by Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

Two articles from The Niles online magazine provide a glimpse of life for the Nuba people of Sudan who have fled from aerial and ground attacks by the Sudanese government forces to Yida Refugee Camp in South Sudan. Even now, Khartoum continues to rain down bombs in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, as well as in Blue Nile State. In the case of the Nuba — many still attempt to wait out the war in mountain caves. They are starving to death gradually, as Sudan refuses to allow the needed humanitarian aid to reach them.

Those who have sought refuge over the border in South Sudan’s Yida Refugee Camp have conditions that are marginally improved. Fewer bombs and ground attacks (they still do come sometimes), some food, and possibly a glimmer of hope that there will be a future. But this hope is often marred by the ongoing trauma experienced by the refugees as a result of what they have suffered.

(Photo credit: The Niles, Hajooj Kuka) Nuba Wrestling at Yida Camp

A March 6, 2013 article in The Niles by Hajooj Kuka tells how the Nuba in Yida are attempting to preserve an important part of their cultural heritage — Nuba wrestling. “Despite everyday hardship in the camp, refugees in Yida organise regular Nuba Wrestling competitions,” reports The Niles. The weekly wrestling matches attract hundreds of watchers.

“The residents of Yida camp believe that wrestling teaches discipline, and is therefore a valuable sport for their children,” Kuka continues. Even more important, though, according to Kuka, is the preservation of the ancient Nuba culture. The Nuba understand that the Islamist regime in Khartoum is trying to wipe out their ethnic and cultural identity. Nuba wrestling can be traced back to the days of ancient Egypt that documented the sport from “the Land of the Blacks” (Sudan) in wall drawings and iconography, says Kuka.

Another March 6 article in The Niles reveals the impact that fleeing from bombs and jihadist troops has had on the Nuba, particularly on children. Journalist Gumaa Al-Fadel writes, “Extended bombing in the Nuba Mountains leaves behind more than corpses. Citizens, especially children, are deeply psychologically scarred.” Al-Fadel interviewed a mother in Yida Refugee Camp who revealed that her 13 year-old daughter “screams while asleep and wakes up crying.” A nurse at the camp explained that the girl, who was “traumatised by government warplanes which repeatedly bombed her local region, leaving her and her family to cower among the rocks,” had nightmares in which she had recurring images of these events.

One refugee girl told Al-Fadel that “her sister and 17 other girls were intercepted by government forces while they were collecting water and wood.” The girls were taken to the army camp “where they were gang-raped and then released the next morning.” Ever since the attack, said the girl, her sister has suffered “from recurrent nightmares, lack of appetite and diarrhoea.”

Al-Fadel also interviewed Dr. Daniel B., a retired doctor working from Juba as a consultant for an organisation to support Nuba refugees. Dr. Daniel said that “Nuba children were exposed to an onslaught resembling genocide,” he urged help from the international and regional community. He revealed that “among the children he met, many looked older than their years and could no longer smile.”

Trauma and disease are twin hardships in Yida Refugee Camp. Al-Fadel reports that “International agency Oxfam last year warned that camps were ticking time bombs, at risk of a major disease outbreak,” and in February “the UNHCR spokesman said that Hepatitis E killed 111 out of 6,017 infected refugees.”

A. N., a human rights activist interviewed by Al-Fadel, stressed that Article 8 (2)-(B) 25 of the International Criminal Court Law stated that intentionally using starvation of citizens as a method of warfare was a war crime. Al-Fadel concludes by quoting A.N.’s comparison of the conflict in the Nuba Mountains to a holocaust: “There are mass graves, killings, raping and starvation.” The stuff of nightmares, even in a place of refuge.

Middle East Americans Want a Strong America Again

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Bashar, Bashir, Beja, campaign, Copts, Egypt, Faith J. H. McDonnell, Foreign Policy, genocide, Iran, Islam, Khartoum, Lebanon, Libya, Middle East, Middle East Americans, Middle East Americans for Romney, Obama, Romney, Sudan, Syria, Walid Phares, Zuhdi Jasser

By Faith McDonnell

Some Arab American and Middle East-related organizations give the impression that the Middle East American vote is all sewn up for President Obama. The Middle East American Coalition for Mitt Romney begs to differ.

The coalition launched on October 12 and held rallies in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Virginia — battleground states in which Middle East Americans are a significant constituency. Their press release indicated that “The Obama Administration has angered many in the community with its lack of a clear strategy on how to move forward in the Middle East. From the recent violence in Libya and Egypt that cost four American lives to the continuing civil war in Syria, Obama’s policy has been inept and failed to present a strong United States in the region.”

Middle East Americans’ activist John Hajjar added, “America needs a leader with a vision for real change in the Middle East who will advocate for the principles of liberty, universal human rights and the free market. The Obama Administration’s lack of a coherent Middle East policy is disastrous for the people of the region and U.S. relations for generations to come.”

Read more here.