One of Ours

The United Nations director for relief in Sudan said Friday that Arab militias were conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing to drive black Africans out of a border region of the country with the apparent tolerance of the Sudanese government.
Jan Egeland, the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said the armed groups were using “scorched earth tactics,” deliberately destroying food and humanitarian supplies and attacking refugee centers in a program of “systematic depopulation.”

“I consider this ethnic cleansing,” he said, estimating that 750,000 people had been forced from their homes and villages, tens of thousands had fled into neighboring Chad and 10,000 might have died.

Speaking to reporters after briefing the Security Council on the situation, he said he was sounding the alarm because it was “one of the most forgotten and neglected humanitarian crises in the world.”...

...relief workers had witnessed beatings, killings and gang rapes, but that alerting Sudanese authorities had gotten no response. He said he personally knew of a number of occasions where the government refused to intervene in "ongoing massacres."

"We can tell they tolerate them," he said of the mass killings...

...He said the virtual civil war was being waged by rebel groups, militias and criminal gangs, as well as by Arab groups attacking black Africans. The fighting began a year ago over local protests that the oil-rich Sudanese government was ignoring the needs of Darfur, which borders Chad...