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EL LAYLA TIMES
Genocide Against Nuba Mountains in Sudan
Nuba people live in caves due to constant bombing of homes.
Nuba people live in caves due to constant bombing of homes.
By Faith
April 18, 2019
Five years ago today, June 6, 2011, the Islamist Republic of Sudan began an attack on the people of the Nuba Mountains that continues right now as you read this post.
When I first started receiving emails and phone calls about bombs dropping from the sky and militiamen on horseback and in tanks committing ground warfare against the civilian men, women, and children in the Nuba Mountains, I couldn’t believe it. This kind of atrocity and genocidal jihad had only been absent from the Nuba Mountains for a few years. And now it was starting again?
In the video below I recollect how at the 1994 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, IRD proposed a resolution on Sudan that contained a description of the “forced Islamization and ethnic cleansing” taking place in the Nuba Mountains. Some General Convention delegates (mostly part of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship!) declared their discomfort with the phrase “forced Islamization.” But look at this description from the seminal report by Dr. Milliard Burr, Quantifying Genocide in Southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains, 1983-1998:
In January 1992, South Kordofan governor, Lt. General al-Hussein, formally declared a Holy War (Jihad) in the Nuba Mountains. By approving of or acquiescing in wholesale murder, abduction, rape, family separation, forced religious conversion, and the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Nuba in so-called “peace villages,” the Khartoum government sought to extirpate the Nuba peoples themselves. There followed more attacks on villages, and a policy of military conquest was attended by a “policy of famine.” By approving the slaughter of villagers, and by initiating policies that would lead ineluctably to the deracination and acculturation of the Nuba peoples, the NIF government is committed to cultural genocide.
That Episcopal General Convention was 22 years ago! How is that we could allow this slaughter of the black, African people groups of the Nuba Mountains to happen again, and to continue being perpetrated by the racist regime in Khartoum?
The President of Sudan, Omar al Bashir (an war criminal, indicted by the International Criminal Court), has called the Nuba “black insects” and “trash” and numerous times has announced his intentions of “cleaning up” the region, i.e. eradicating the Nuba people. And the world, including the U.S. government, calls that “inflamed rhetoric.”
It is not “rhetoric” when Antonovs are circling schools, churches, and clinics, dropping bombs on them. It is not “rhetoric” when militias, possibly even aided by UN ‘peacekeepers,’ round up thousands of Nuba people fleeing from the attacks and then slaughter them and hide their bodies in a mass grave. It is not “rhetoric” when people are deliberately starved to death.
That inflamed rhetoric has been getting more and more inflamed lately, then. You could even say it is combustible, considering the number of burn victims that Mother of Mercy Hospital, the only hospital in the Nuba Mountains, has been trying to save in recent weeks (when they are not being bombed themselves). Our valiant friends from the Persecution Project Foundation recently brought a skin graft mesher machine to the heroic Dr. Tom Catena, the American doctor who remains amongst the bombs, saving lives, at that one and only hospital for the Nuba.
Today, on this anniversary of the start of the jihad, Nuba from the United States are demonstrating in front of the United Nations in New York. As I mention in the video below, they are also presenting to the UN and to world leaders a petition asking that the UN, the United States, the European Union, and the African Union take the following actions:
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Reform the policy of pressuring victims of Sudan’s aggression to make deals with that oppressive dictatorship.
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Prevent aerial attacks on civilians by either imposing a no-fly zone, destroying the regime’s aerial assets, or supporting those who are fighting to protect civilians and promote freedom and democracy
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Retain sanctions against the Sudan government, as well as the listing of Sudan as a supporter of terrorism
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Create a system to monitor and deliver sufficient humanitarian aid to those in need
The entire petition is available on the Center for Security Policy’s website here. Please read it and pray about what you can to help the people of Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, whether it be to help support organizations that are providing humanitarian aid, or getting involved in advocacy. One of the best sources for immediate news from the front lines is Nuba Reports. And look for more information about the Nuba genocide in the coming days here, as well.
A version of this article first appeared in The Institute on Religion and Democracy Blog.