Sudan Exposed: “Starve Them”, “Empty the Camps”
by Elizabeth Kendal with the Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin
Link to web article here. On 31 August Sudan’s most senior military and security officials met in the National Defense College, Khartoum, for a Military and Security Committee Meeting to discuss the ‘Management of Military Activities’. In what can be described only as a major security breach, the minutes of that meeting were subsequently leaked to long-time Sudan researcher, expert and advocate, Eric Reeves. The document has now been fully translated and verified as authentic.
The 13 officials, most of whom are generals, spent considerable time discussing how they might manipulate the 2015 national elections to give themselves ‘another five years of legitimacy’. They also discussed international relations, describing Iran as ‘our biggest ally in the region’, and a ‘strategic partner’. The minutes confirm that Sudan is supporting numerous Islamic jihadist movements, including the al-Houthi (Shi’ites) in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and Libya Dawn in Tripoli (Libya). Defense Minister Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein even boasts that nobody has a data-base of jihadist groups as extensive as Sudan’s.
Regarding Khartoum’s co-operation on counter-terrorism with the Obama administration (USA), the Defense Minister confirmed: ‘We release only limited information to the Americans according to the request and the price is the armed movements file.’ This statement gives rise to concerns that the Obama administration might be selling out opposition movements that are merely resisting Islamisation, racial-religious hatred and genocide.
Critically, the officials lament that, in the wake of military successes by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army - North (SPLM/A-N), crop cultivation has gone ahead in large areas of South Kordofan, where the Nuba Mountains are located. Director General of the Intelligence and Security, General Siddiq Amer, insisted that this year’s healthy sorghum crop be destroyed. ‘We must not allow them to harvest these crops,’ he said. ‘We must starve them,’ so they will desert the SPLM/A-N and be open to recruitment by the Government of Sudan (GoS).
This is exactly what the GoS did in the Nuba Genocide of the early 1990s, when they bombed and starved the people to the brink of death before offering them food and shelter in ‘Peace Camps’, but only on conversion to Islam, complete with name change, indoctrination and often military recruitment as well. Hundreds of thousands of Nuba chose to starve rather than convert, in what must surely be the most difficult call any parent could make.
Concerning South Sudan, the minutes are clear: Khartoum has been interfering in and prolonging South Sudan’s civil war by arming and backing the forces of the sacked Vice President Riek Machar. The plan is for South Sudan to adopt a federal system as approved by President Kirr and announced by IGAD on 22 October, with Riek Machar ruling over the oil-rich ‘Greater Upper Nile’ region, comprising Jonglei, Upper Nile and Unity states, which Khartoum intends will secede from South Sudan and be annexed by Sudan, thereby restoring all the oil fields to Khartoum without Khartoum having to fire a shot. To that end, Chief of Joint Operations, Lt Gen. Imadadiin Adawi, proposed that Riek Machar be commissioned and equipped to ‘clean [ethnically cleanse] the whole Greater Upper Nile area’.
Furthermore, Director of Military Intelligence and Security, Lt Gen. Siddiig Aamir, proposed that regime forces ‘infiltrate and empty the refugee camps’ in South Sudan’s oil-rich Unity and Upper Nile States on the false premise that the Government of South Sudan is arming and supporting the SPLA-N. [Yida Camp in Unity State is run by Samaritan’s Purse and is home to many thousands of mostly Christian refugees from the Nuba Mountains.] According to Aamir, the aim is that, once separated from their food and shelter, the traumatized, desperate refugees then could be recruited (doubtless with food and shelter) to fight against the SPLA-N. This is the same GoS signature strategy to be employed in South Kordofan.
Related Articles
- What the Khartoum Regime Really Thinks
— SUDAN – Research, Analysis, and Advocacy - Yida Refugee Camp Relief
— Samaritan’s Purse - Human rights abuses and starvation in South Sudan
— The Daily Mail - Quick facts: What you need to know about the South Sudan crisis
— Mercy Corps - Agencies battle to stave off starvation in South Sudan’s civil war sanctuaries
— The Guardian