Sudan helps militia burn town in Darfur

NY Times:

The janjaweed are back.

They came to this dusty town(Suleia) in the Darfur region of Sudan on horses and camels on market day. Almost everybody was in the bustling square. At the first clatter of automatic gunfire, everyone ran.

The militiamen laid waste to the town — burning huts, pillaging shops, carrying off any loot they could find and shooting anyone who stood in their way, residents said. Asha Abdullah Abakar, wizened and twice widowed, described how she hid in a hut, praying it would not be set on fire.

“I have never been so afraid,” she said.

The attacks by the janjaweed, the fearsome Arab militias that came three weeks ago, accompanied by government bombers and followed by the Sudanese Army, were a return to the tactics that terrorized Darfur in the early, bloodiest stages of the conflict.

Such brutal, three-pronged attacks of this scale — involving close coordination of air power, army troops and Arab militias in areas where rebel troops have been — have rarely been seen in the past few years, when the violence became more episodic and fractured. But they resemble the kinds of campaigns that first captured the world’s attention and prompted the Bush administration to call the violence in Darfur genocide.

Aid workers, diplomats and analysts say the return of such attacks is an ominous sign that the fighting in Darfur, which has grown more complex and confusing as it has stretched on for five years, is entering a new and deadly phase — one in which the government is planning a scorched-earth campaign against the rebel groups fighting here as efforts to find a negotiated peace founder.

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Sudan remains a testament to the failure of the multilateral approach when dealing with an Islamic supremacist government whose word is not good and with other countries in the UN who have an interest in supporting that despicable government. It has become genocide by multilateralism, because there is no cowboys willing to go in and impose regime change on the government responsible for the mess. The aid agencies only clutter the battle space and are ineffective at best and targets at worst because the aid they bring would impose a strategic defeat on the government if they were permitted to work freely. The fact is the government prefers genocide by starvation. It is less work than burning villages and leaves fewer photos of their guilt.

Nicholas Kristof reports that genocide is about to flare again in southern Sudan also. Southern Sudan is most Christian and black giving the bigots in Khartoum a twofer.