SLM/A-AW URGENT INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIQUE ON SUDAN’S CRISIS
January, 6th, 2022
The leadership of the Sudan Liberation Movement & Army unequivocally condemns the ongoing multiple criminal actions perpetrated by the illegitimate ruling military junta in Khartoum,de facto headed by coup d’etat leaders General Abdel Fattah al Bourhan and his state – sponsored Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paratroops militias, against the oppressed people of Sudan. In a long list of egregious offenses that among them witness the unceasing ferocity and gangster conduct of the state military, paramilitaries, partner militias, police and intelligence officers, ghost battalions of the regime of former president al Bashir in their indiscriminate use of lethal force, torture, rape and arbitrary arrest of unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators throughout Sudan, alongside an upsurge of as brutal wanton killing of civilians in Darfur by the same actors, to our great alarm there is now the renewed specter of famine also looming in Darfur due to deliberate government action.
The massive looting of vital food supplies in World Food Program warehouses in Darfur and the subsequent suspension of alimentary aid by the UN in North Darfur now presents the danger of starvation to more than two million people, in addition to more than two million others across Darfur facing certain death through humanitarian denial and genocide by attrition. The thievery in North Darfur was openly carried out by uniformed militias loyal to 25th of October 2021 coup regime in Khartoum betrayers of the Peoples Revolution. It was a targeted deliberately planned operation that echoes the proven tactics of the former regime of deposed President Omar al Bashir, where hunger and a purposeful blockade of all humanitarian supplies, was always a weapon of choice in the unending Darfur genocide alongside a scorched earth policy, where death by starvation and disease played as key a role in the destruction and mass murder of Darfur, as did the military arsenal of the state. Clearly the intention remains the same, to break the will of the people to resist tyranny.
As the United Nations contrary to all logic and the true situational security assessment of Darfur, ignored all of our repeated pleas not to withdraw the UNAMID peacekeeping contingent, on the hallucinatory fallacy of what was always a purely cosmetic peace process and improved safety conditions in Darfur that rationalized its drawdown, both endorsed by the UN Security Council and parallel campaigns by the Sudan Troika countries, the United States, United Kingdom, Norway, as well as the European Union and African Union; the UN is not without shared culpability in enabling the security vacuum in Darfur, by its collective incoherent judgment, that has now brought forth predictable lethal results.
As emblematic of this failure is the insistence that the genocidaire government troops, Rapid Support Forces and their allied militias would provide security for the people of Darfur. The killers cannot become protectors through enthusiastic semantics. The skewed logic of it is comparable to assigning Second World War Nazi SS death squads and their collaborationist auxiliary police, fellow genocidaires, to protect the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Because of the kleptocratic and disastrous governance of the current authoritarian regime in Khartoum, that is in practice a continuation of Bashir’s ruinous legacy, already half of the population of Sudan is food insecure. But the humanitarian catastrophe that awaits war – torn areas of Darfur, Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile state, if prompt corrective action is not taken, evokes a present-day waking nightmare of imminent mass starvation, comparable to past famines in Biafra and Ethiopia. Nonetheless; the situation in Darfur continue to be the worst and can exacerbate to become the next Yemen.
With the utmost sense of urgency we call upon the UN Security Council, the Troika countries, the EU and African Union to pass a joint emergency resolution and not suspend life saving food distribution in North Darfur but instead to take prompt measures to bring in new food supplies commensurate to the need, with an interim international security force to ensure they are not looted again. Inaction is not acceptable and if the so-called international community will sit on its hands, it too will bear an undeniable share in manufacturing a man-made famine that can result in a vast death toll. Indifference will amount to complicity.
We also call upon the International Criminal Court and all countries that practice extra-territorial law to note command responsibility for the looting of the WFP warehouses in Darfur, as a conscious method of repression and tool of war by other means, that can cost untold lives, borne by the leaders of the regime of deposed president Bashir, leaders of Janjaweeds ,Rapid Support Forces militias and their partner gangster militias, all awaiting their time in the dock at the Hague for documented past and present genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
If swift measures are not taken to prevent mass famine in Darfur, the UN will be writing a new dark chapter of infamy by its paralysis that will haunt the conscience of the world, as it did in its moral and operational failure in the Rwandan and Srebrenica genocides. We must see tangible action not mere words and the UN is only as capable as the five permanent members of the Security Council allow it to be.
We urge the UN and the great powers that drive it, to act in the name of humanity and common decency, before it is too late and Darfur’s plight reaches a new pinnacle of unbearable suffering and horror. History will record whether you took the necessary moral action or turned away and aided the butchers of their own people, by a demonstrable lack of courage and humanist commitment.
As the late beloved, moral giant of the South African Anti-Apartheid struggle, our African continent sadly lost recently, Archbishop Desmond Tutu stated so eloquently: “When you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
Sincerely,
Chairman of the Sudan Liberation Movement and Commander in Chief, Sudan Liberation Army.
Abdul Wahid al Nur