November 14th, 2022
Dear High Commissioner Volker Turk,
The leadership of the Sudan Liberation Movement, Sudan Liberation Army and our integral civic branches inside Sudan and in the diaspora, the Coordination of Internally Displaced Peoples & Refugees of Darfur and the national university Students’ wing of the United People’s Front (UPF) and SLM graduate sector, collectively comprising over millions oppressed Sudanese citizens, upon your first official visit to Sudan, urge you to issue more forceful, specific and unequivocal condemnation of the enduring, serial human rights crimes and atrocities perpetrated by the genocidaire Sudanese military dictatorship, that will state clearly, concrete consequences through the mechanisms of international law will be brought to bear against the regime and it will be held accountable for its unending record of barbarous conduct inflicted on its own population.
While we can laud that you stated your solidarity with the people of Sudan in their unmet wish for peace and justice, citing human rights are “indivisible,” if impunity remains and no accountability is imposed upon the intellectual authors and physical perpetrators of a grotesque array of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity witnessed in Sudan for too long, your statement is reduced to mere well intentioned, symbolism, as the colloquialism goes “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” A further cold reality is that the illegitimate Sudanese government’s, National Human Rights Mechanism body, you met with, is primarily a rubber stamp for the junta providing only a false cosmetic veneer of ostensible but insincere concern for human rights reform in Sudan.
We are painfully aware of the common public relations tactic on the international stage shared by unindicted war criminals and junta leaders, Generals Abdel Fattah al Bourhan and Mohamad Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo, is to regularly pay lip service to as wildly fictive an intended pathway to the rule of law, restoration of the will and sovereignty of the people and democratic transition, while the kleptocratic, blood drenched, Sudanese police state deepens its stranglehold on power. It is nothing more than hollow posturing and political theater.
Hemeti and al Bourhan are not protectors of the Sudanese nation, as they pretend to be, but instead they are its butchers, robbers and jailers; now joined by resurrected key elements of the ancient regime awaiting their time in the dock at the Hague, with deposed tyrant Omar al Bashir, as do many senior officers in the military and security apparatus also merit.
Human rights in Sudan can’t be restored in a vacuum of a parallel universe that does not exist. Sudan’s true condition under the iron grip of a ruthless military dictatorship is an inescapable reality. Nor can human rights be guaranteed by pro forma measures with no tangible means to secure them. The United Nations and your office must bluntly address the gruesome litany of crimes routinely carried out ad nauseum by the junta and introduce punitive measures for command responsibility, as well as accountability for the state sanctioned gangsters that enforce with horrific violence the true aims of the military regime. The dictatorship’s murderous thugs since 2017, benefit from a criminal partnership on the ground with the Kremlin’s equally vile parastatal mercenaries from Wagner Group. Why is the UN silent on this unholy alliance?
The United Nations is also partially morally complicit in Sudan’s suffering, where despite our many repeated pleas over the years to the UN Secretariat and UN Security Council not to withdraw the UNAMID peacekeepers from Darfur, the Blue Helmets stood down and left on the ludicrous fantasy that peaceful conditions had returned, and the genocide ended. What have we witnessed since then? The same horror we have always seen.
The regular slaughter of civilians by the regime forces and Hemeti’s Rapid Support Forces and their partner militias is unceasing. The same pattern of extra-judicial killings, arbitrary arrests with no legal recourse and the endemic use of rape and torture, untold numbers of disappeared in the regime’s dungeons and the constant lethal use of force by the military, paramilitaries, allied militias, police, and state intelligence organs against unarmed civilian demonstrators, resistance committees, UPF students, human rights defenders and activists is in daily view. The deliberate, brutal quashing of all legitimate dissent, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the savage crackdown on a captive nation’s outcry for civil and human rights, and the demand for democracy, is impossible to deny.
The responsibility for the waking nightmare of Sudan’s national agony lies squarely with Generals al Bourhan and Hemeti and their henchmen. If the so-called international community represented by the United Nations, cannot bring to bear a stronger moral authority and genuine tangible corrective measures against the regime in Khartoum, gleefully wading in the blood and tears of the Sudanese people; the very same Sudanese people, at the end of their patience, courageously breaking the chains that have kept them in bondage for generations, will not fail to understand it is only up to them in their sacred struggle, to usher in the day of liberation with or without arms.
Secular democracy, human rights, civil rights, and the right to live in peace with human dignity, justice, equal opportunity, equal citizenship and freedom from dictatorship, fear, institutional racism, sectarianism, misogyny, state sponsored terror, genocide, torture, imprisonment, kleptocracy and state manufactured poverty, hunger and humanitarian denial, is not a demand we make meekly nor quietly. It is neither a favor we expected to be gifted, as we live in the true world and we will seize our freedom with our own hands, as it is our God given right as unbowed human beings. If the UN perpetuates its dysfunctional pattern in Sudan, despite its best intentions, until we see genuine dramatic change in policy and no longer witness the tyrants heading a cruel, genocidal, amoral, thieving dictatorship, hideously posing as guardians of a nation, being further legitimized, and being handled with white gloves, our confidence and faith in the UN will remain in abeyance. “Deeds, not words.”
Sincerely,
Abdul Wahid al Nur
Chairman of the Sudan Liberation Movement & Commander in Chief of the Sudan Liberation Army
ليك تحيه وتقدير ي كمرد قدااااامبس