Click here to read an informative review by British blogger Simon at Under The Green Hill blog.
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New York Times
The Secret Genocide Archive
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
February 23, 2005 - excerpt:
This child had his face bashed in, presumably with a rifle butt, during a massacre in Hamada in January 2005.Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company/Nicholas D. Kristof (via Richard at Hyscience with thanks)
The photo above was taken in the village of Hamada on Jan. 15, 2005 right after a Sudanese government-backed militia, the janjaweed, attacked it and killed 107 people. One of them was this little boy.
Kristof writes: "I'm not showing the photo of his older brother, about 5 years old, who lay beside him because the brother had been beaten so badly that nothing was left of his face. And alongside the two boys was the corpse of their mother."
Photo: This man was castrated and then shot in the head. This is a common fate of male prisoners taken by the Janjaweed.
Photo: Here's Zahra again. After her husband and sons were murdered, the Janjaweed carried her and her sisters off and gang-raped them. The sisters were murdered, and Zahra was finally released, naked, after the Janjaweed slashed her leg to mark her forever.
There are thousands more of these photos. Many of them show attacks on children and are too horrific for a newspaper.
One wrenching photo in the archive shows the manacled hands of a teenager from the girls' school in Suleia who was burned alive. It's been common for the Sudanese militias to gang-rape teenage girls and then mutilate or kill them.
Another photo shows the body of a young girl, perhaps 10 years old, staring up from the ground where she was killed. Still another shows a man who was castrated and shot in the head.
This archive, including scores of reports by the monitors on the scene, underscores that this slaughter is waged by and with the support of the Sudanese government as it tries to clear the area of non-Arabs. Many of the photos show men in Sudanese Army uniforms pillaging and burning African villages. I hope the African Union will open its archive to demonstrate publicly just what is going on in Darfur.
The archive also includes an extraordinary document seized from a janjaweed official that apparently outlines genocidal policies. Dated last August, the document calls for the "execution of all directives from the president of the republic" and is directed to regional commanders and security officials.
"Change the demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes," the document urges. It encourages "killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur."
It's worth being skeptical of any document because forgeries are possible. But the African Union believes this document to be authentic. I also consulted a variety of experts on Sudan and shared it with some of them, and the consensus was that it appears to be real.
1 comment:
i cant belive tha people could do this type of things to another human bin is like they dont have family themselves n just cause they have no type of respect in socity they get treated like this ....i hope one day they realize what they doing and pay for what they have done to this poor people....and ima make myself responsible to let the world know whats going on with this poor people ima make a big protest in my school ......and by tha way its kind of sad tha probably a 94 percent of the world might not eveen know about whats going on right now over there..........NAME:Gustavo Ventura...EMAIL :gustavito2121@yahoo.com
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