OxBlog

Thursday, April 22, 2004

# Posted 6:19 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE HOLOCAUST OF OUR TIME? This on the Sudan, and via CNN:
"What I saw was village after village which has been burnt down," [British journalist] Phil Cox said on CNN's International Correspondents program.

"Usually there are bodies around the villages. There are mass graves outside. When I say mass graves, I mean large pits in the earth, maybe 10 to 20 bodies in them, and these pits, 20 to 30 pits around the villages."
A promising sign is that an investigative team from the UN Human Rights Commission has been granted access to Sudan's western Darfur region today, and during the time it has been barred from entering Sudanese territory, has been conducting interviews with refugees in Chad. The U.S. administration has attracted praise lately from its more accustomed critics for successfully urging the Islamist Khartoum government and southern rebels to the negotiating table (and in the process, acquiring greater support from Khartoum against Al Qa'ida, which in its territory is strong). However, the ceasefire toward the south has directed Khartoum's fury to its west, and the nations of the world have been unduly reticent to decry the genocide there for fear that in so doing they would reopen one of the globe's most long-festering civil wars.
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