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Sudan’s disaster demands worldwide attention

Being displaced from your home is a difficult situation. For many African citizens though, this disastrous feeling has become a predominate factor in their lives.

For some, it wasn’t a natural disaster that caused them to be displaced from their homes, their country or, worse, their family and friends. In the Darfur region of the Sudan, approximately 2.5 million people have been displaced from their homes and families by their own government and other forces.

For nearly four years the inhabitants of Darfur have been in the middle of a conflict. According to reports from Human Rights Watch, the Sudanese government has supported pro-Arab and pro-government militia groups such as the Janjaweed in attacking non-Arab ethnicities living in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The Janjaweed, which in Arabic means "a devil on a horse," and the Sudanese government have been accused of raping, murdering and torturing non-Arab groups in Darfur.

We have to ask ourselves why this is happening. More than 200,000 people have wrongfully lost their lives, families and homes in the name of a crass ideology, an ideology that reminds one of those behind the genocide in Rwanda or during the Holocaust.

It is an ideology that should not even exist because no one person should consider him or herself more important and more superior than another person.

But what makes things worse is that the Sudanese government is killing its own people; it’s not just about being in a different social class anymore.

The conflict in Darfur is about genocide, the act of killing an entire ethnic, religious or racial group. According to an allafrica.com article, approximately 55,000 civilians were displaced from their homes this summer alone. That’s an obscenely large number of people having to seek refuge. It is perplexing to think government officials would simply turn their backs on their people and that it wouldn’t even try speaking peacefully with representatives from every region.

The Sudanese government, specifically the regime in Khartoum, has even gone as far as to restrict humanitarian access to the Darfur region which makes their efforts increasingly difficult and depletes food and medical supplies needed to care for the sick and wounded.

Without humanitarian effort, the people living in the Darfur region will not survive. There are thousands, if not millions, of people starving and contracting various diseases, some of which, such as malaria and cholera, are communicable.

The fact of the matter is this: the number of people being killed or dying is steadily growing, as is the number of people being displaced from their homes. Families are being separated with only the hope that they might be together again. All of these things are happening because a majority of the inhabitants of Darfur are non-Arabs.

Doesn’t anyone care that innocent people are being maliciously killed? The future of Darfur is in serious jeopardy and desperately needs help.

Latimer, a post-baccalaureate English student, can be reached via [email protected]

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