"The genocide we're missing"

Part of the failure to comprehend the crisis in the Sudan has been the tendency to present the political situation in its full complexity, which is beyond the grasp of all but experts. But the lineaments of it are simple enough. For more than 30 years a civil war has been fought in the vast north-east African country. State power is in the hands of the Muslim Arab population. Discrimination and repression has been visited upon groups in southern and western Sudan who are African rather than Arab, Christian-animist rather than Muslim.

In 2003 a ceasefire in this long war was obtained, and peace talks are now under way at Naivisha in Kenya. The Sudanese Government has used this lull as an opportunity to enforce "ethnic cleansing" of "disloyal" African-Muslim population groups in the western region of Darfur. They have done this by supporting and failing to restrain groups of Arab militias, who have killed more than 30,000 people, and displaced close to a million more.

Full Article : theage.com.au