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A Horrific Joke: As the Nuba Mountains People Starve, U.S. Leaders Praise their Anti-Genocide Effort



Each and every day, innocent citizens (infants, toddlers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and others) are perishing from forced starvation in the Nuba Mountains in Sudan. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is.
Furious they were not allowed to secede from Sudan and join the new Republic of South Sudan, many in the Nuba Mountains began calling into question the authority of Sudanese President Omar al Bashir, At one and the same time, at huge rallies, they also called on al Bashir to give himself up to the International Criminal Court (ICC) where he is wanted on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes for atrocities perpetrated in Darfur. They also decried what they perceived as the rigged election of Ahmed Haroun, who is wanted on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes perpetrated in Darfur, as the new governor of the Nuba Mountains. Angry at the dissension in the Nuba Mountains, al Bashir unleashed ground troops, along with Antonov bombers and MIGs, against the Nuba Mountains. Instead of solely attempting to apprehend the potential rebels, al Bashir, as he is wont to do, carried out a scorched earth policy in which unarmed civilians were severely injured and killed. Fearful of being killed, hundreds of thousands of Nuba Mountains people fled up into the caves and crevasses of the sheer mountains looming over their villages and farmland. As they ran out of food, they were forced to exist on roots, grasses, leaves, and insects. Slowly but surely their situation inexorably crept from hunger to malnutrition to severe malnutrition to outright starvation. And thus, for the past ten months, people have perished on a daily basis.

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When criticized by the international community, al Bashir said he was willing to allow food to be transported to the region, but only by Sudanese nationals. Fearing he would send spies and undercover police in with the humanitarian aid, the Nuba Mountains people balked and called on the international community to deliver the food. In turn, al Bashir banned any outside agencies from entering the Nuba Mountains. And thus, for the past ten months the world has watched as tens of thousands of people began fleeing across the Sudan and South Sudan border in search of food and sat, largely in silence, as untold numbers of others have perished from starvation. Granted, the UN and the United States have attempted to reason with al Bashir, but how does one reason with a despot, especially one who is inclined to genocidal actions and knows he has nothing to lose since he’s already a wanted man? Furthermore, diplomatic efforts have resulted in naught. And thus to continue to believe that sooner or later al Bashir will be moved to grant ready access to the Nuba Mountains plays right into his dictatorial and murderous hands. Both the UN and the United States have been urged, time and again, to act, versus engage in idle talk. To date, neither has seen fit to do so. At one and the same time, President Obama has had the chutzpah and callowness to tout his administration as being one of the most, if not the most, forward looking in regard to its commitment to the prevention of genocide. As the cliché goes, it would be laughable if the situation of the Nuba Mountains people wasn’t so horrific. More specifically, in April of this year, Obama spouted the following words at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.:
“Never again” is a challenge to nations. It’s a bitter truth -- too often, the world has failed to prevent the killing of innocents on a massive scale. And we are haunted by the atrocities that we did not stop and the lives we did not save. Three years ago today, I joined many of you for a ceremony of remembrance at the U.S. Capitol. And I said that we had to do "everything we can to prevent and end atrocities." And so I want to report back to some of you today to let you know that as President I’ve done my utmost to back up those words with deeds. Last year, in the first-ever presidential directive on this challenge, I made it clear that “preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States of America.”
“A core national interest”? “A core moral responsibility”? One would never know it. Does this president have no shame? While he spoke those words people in the Nuba Mountains were literally continuing to experience the horrible, wrenching pain of severe malnutrition and abject hunger, and the death that accompanies such. Essentially, the dictatorial government of Sudan was, once again, killing its own people, just as it did some 400,000 in Darfur this past decade and in the Nuba Mountains back in the late 1980s and 1990s. Does Obama have no sense of integrity? In one breath he promises not to allow crimes against humanity and genocide to be perpetrated and in the next he conveniently looks away from the facts on the ground in the Nuba Mountains. Sadly, and outrageously, Obama was far from through spouting splendid sounding but vacuous words to a mass of sycophants who seemed to hang on to his every word:
Now we’re doing something more. We’re making sure that the United States government has the structures; the mechanisms to better prevent and respond to mass atrocities. So I created the first-ever White House position dedicated to this task. It’s why I created a new Atrocities Prevention Board, to bring together senior officials from across our government to focus on this critical mission. This is not an afterthought. This is not a sideline in our foreign policy. The board will convene for the first time today, at the White House.
What the world, and especially those facing death at the hands of a despot, does not need more of is another board, another think tank, where words lord it over action. Fortunately, Obama cannot pull a Bill Clinton regarding this matter because plenty of us know that he (Obama) knows what is going on in the Nuba Mountains. Thus, unlike Clinton who had the unbelievable gall to fly to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and stand on the tarmac and issue his filthy lie of an excuse for not doing everything in his government’s power to halt the 1994 Rwandan genocide (“It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in the offices, day after day after day, who did fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror”), Obama will have to come up with a different lie. Obama’s administration actually debated whether to try to establish a humanitarian corridor up to the Nuba Mountains despite al Bashir's warning not to do so. That was back in January of 2012 when it was well known that people in the Nuba Mountains were beginning to suffer from severe malnutrition. Now, almost a year later, the Obama Administration continues to do what it was doing then: talking. Over the past ten months, a group of genocide scholars from across the globe have sent Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice one urgent letter after another not only calling for action but providing specific plans of action that could be carried out with the least danger and virtually no military troops on the ground. The only reply from the man of words is silence. Absolute silence. The arrogance of that silence is matched, sadly, by the daily silencing of voices in the Nuba Mountains, as one innocent person after another breathes his/her last breath and is buried in the stony ground high above their beloved farms to which they have no access.


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Samuel Totten -- Bio and Archives

Samuel Totten, a genocide scholar at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, has conducted research in the Nuba Mountains. His latest book, Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains, Sudan


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