Since most of the people here are law students, it means you're all good students. To understand Darfur, you must study the history of this regime. It's worse than what you hear on the news. MUCH.I'm disabled, living now in Mexico on SS Disability. Before I came here, I learned (in 1994) about the Sudanese genocide, while doing research in the library for a book I was writing. I stumbled upon the information entirely by accident. What I learned stood my hair on end, and not just because of the genocide, but because our entire freeworld governments and media were keeping the public from knowing about it, through the simple expedient of calling it a "civil war."Here's what that "civil war" often consisted of. Government troops would enter a native village in Southern Sudan, herd all the people into their own thatched cattle-byres, then set them to the torch. After burning their homes, livestock and crops, it was on to the next village.Civil war? If that isn't genocide, what is? Now you know that words really CAN kill.It was only because the southern black people formed militias and tried to protect themselves that the term "civil war" was slapped on this genocide. I guess they were supposed to lie down and open their veins. But there are indigenous militias in Darfur, too, but nobody is calling that a civil war. Mainly because they can't. It has gotten too much publicity. Otherwise, the world and its media would ignore this genocide, too. Had the first genocide gotten this publicity long ago, Darfur wouldn't have happened. And maybe - just maybe - neither would Bosnia, Rwanda, and others. A successful genocide always breeds more of the same. Which is exactly what the world GOT.You'll want to know the basis for these statements. All you need do is check with Amnesty International. They kept volumes of documentary evidence of these and many other atrocities. More than enough to lay charges of genocide against the regime as long ago as '94, probably earlier.This genocide began in the mid-80's (probably before that) and only ended with a "peace agreement" a few years ago. They then turned their attentions to Darfur. It had lasted for 20 years, and it appears they're gearing up to start it all over again, particularly if the pressure they're under about Darfur forces them to tone it down for a while.I have much to say, from the years I've spent researching the Sudanese regime, too much to put down here. I have established a yahoo account called stop genocide. Put an underscore between those two words, and you've got it. Use the word "Sudan" in the subject line, to distinguish from spam. I'll send you information that I've gleaned over the years. I am selling exactly nothing.The world knows, but refuses to acknowledge, that no genocidal regime has ever been stopped with diplomacy. People capable of genocide have no regard for diplomacy, except as a way of confusing opponents and gaining time. They are people who have voluntarily chosen to disengage themselves from their humanitarian moorings, and now can never go back. The only thing they understand is force. Though I am a dove, I have no choice but to accept that force is the only way to rid the Sudan of this obscene regime. If there is ONE single reason for war, it is to stop genocides. Yet every other kind of war is engaged in except that kind.You may also wish to inquire why it is that not ONE Islamic State has spoken out against the Sudan. In fact, several of them are protesting the indictment against Bashir, claiming it trespasses on Sudanese sovereignty. It might inspire you to study why it is that Islam appears to condone genocide.No nation is entitled to sovreignty when it preys on the people whose job it is to protect. When the "sanctity of international borders" is of greater importance than the sanctity of the human lives within them, we, too, have parted from our own humanitarian moorings.The people in Darfur are black and indigenous - the government wants them all dead. But they're Muslims. To offset any grousing among the northern Arabs in Khartoum and Omdurman, the government uses the janjaweed as their surrogate. In the earlier genocide, such subtleties were not needed. Yet we call Darfur a genocide and don't even recognize the FIRST GENOCIDE. Darfur is treated, worldwide, as though it was something that occurred "in a vacuum," when, in reality, it is only Chapter 2 of a larger - and much more horrific - genocide.In the first genocide, 2 1/2 MILLION indigenous, non-Muslim blacks were slaughtered, over a period of 20 YEARS, during which the entire free world said nothing. To our everlasting shame.Now, they're stuck. They can't make any references to the first genocide that would help them in considering or dealing with the Darfur situation. Awkward indeed. To do so would be to admit the two decades in which genocide went on, unimpeded and with total impunity, while our governments and media knew full-well what was going on, but kept us in the dark about it.What you don't know is that Darfur, an acknowledged genocide, is actually the "gentler" of the two.This bears on much more than just two genocides perpetrated by the Sudan. It bears - heavily - on the question of just how free our own nations really are, and how free and objective our news media really are. To keep secret something that ought to have been headline news - internationally - is something that ought to scare you to bits.You all know how to do research. I urge you to do it. Look up such things as "Arabization," "Islamization," and names from the first genocide, such as Hasan al Turabi and John Garang. "Arabization" will tell you exactly HOW rape can be used as part of a genocide. Check out the slavery, too, which occurred in the first genocide - and note that slavery is NOT on the list of charges against Bashir. It can't be; it happened in that "other genocide," the one that "didn't happen." Research the atrocities of the first genocide, starting with Amnesty Int'l. The information is all there; it simply isn't something the public is guided to at all.The world in which you intend to work, and your chosen field of the law, make it imperative that you learn something about how even the best democracies can fail in their basic duties to their own citizens. And you ought to learn how this silence came about, how all of the freeworld nations participated, how it is that all political parties are equally complicit in this silence. How could such a thing happen? If it happened, and if nothing is done, it can and will happen again. We ignore this matter very much at our OWN peril.If you would seek to work in the legal field, you must gain some knowledge about how the law, and the public trust vested in governments and media, can be so heinously compromised, while we citizens remain ignorant of it all for decades.You cannot begin to understand Darfur until you have studied the first Sudanese genocide. That puts Darfur in perspective rather eloquently.You have more resources available to you than I do. Learn of this first genocide, then use your resources to make this information available to the entire free world public. We can't fix a problem we don't know exists. If you do your studying well enough, you'll have AMPLE chapter and verse to support that publicity effort. You can make the knowledge available for the average world citizen to learn about.Maybe then something can be done to clean up whatever rot it was that caused our governments and media to betray their public trust by collectively hiding a horrible truth from us all.Holly BergeimChapala, Jalisco, Mexico
"The world knows, but refuses to acknowledge, that no genocidal regime has ever been stopped with diplomacy. People capable of genocide have no regard for diplomacy, except as a way of confusing opponents and gaining time. They are people who have voluntarily chosen to disengage themselves from their humanitarian moorings, and now can never go back. The only thing they understand is force. Though I am a dove, I have no choice but to accept that force is the only way to rid the Sudan of this obscene regime."This all applied to Iraq as well, of course, but yet many criticize its liberation from a murderous regime. People are idiots.
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