Students With A View

Darfur’s humanitarian crisis, bloody and focused enough to even be called a genocide, has called attention the world over. Britain’s foreign secretary David Miliband has called for the faster deployment of peacekeepers to Sudan, and also addressed the issues of the large number of bombings taking place in Darfur, specifically referring to the  “fresh offensive by government soldiers and Arab militiamen against rebels in the war-torn region where hundreds of thousands have been killed in bombings and raids by militias.” (Britain Calls for Sudan to End Bombing. Yahoo News) China itself has also taken up a particularly significant role in Sudan’s war. Though China has claimed the intentions of help by sending out a special envoy and many engineers to Africa, they also will not use their influence on Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, to seek peace instead of the constant warring. No one seems willing to help past a certain point, and the worst part is, no one seems to know who to help; it’s difficult to even point the bad guy out.

            One of the most obvious villains, however, is the armed force called the Janjaweed, who apparently were unleashed by the Sudanese government itself. The Janjaweed’s original goal was to wipe out the JEM (Justice and Equality Movement), the rebel fighters against Sudan, but they’ve gone out of control. They have many methods of both killing and humiliating the Dafurians; the two best-known are bombings…and rape.

            Rape is a touchy subject, one that most people have some sort of connection with, and that is why the Dafurians’ plight hits home with so many different people. The Janjaweed are systematically using rape to ethnically cleanse Darfur, and the events are so widespread is it impossible to even get a fair estimate. The Janjaweed seize the women on the single reason that they are black, calling them dogs and abid, meaning slaves, and when the rape-children are born, they are at least partially Arab, like their fathers. The children of that generation are the product of a racial purification, and it is a sign that the Janjaweed have taken this all too far. They’re out of control, killing randomly, and without the signal to stop, they’ll continue wiping out Darfur under legal prefaces.

–Alchemists Ennui