50 years genocide and war in the Sudan

More than 3.5 million people – almost exclusively black Africans of the Christian and Muslim faiths or supporters of their own religions – have fallen victim to the genocide, civil war, expulsion and other violations of human rights in the past five decades. This balance sheet of terror has been drawn up by the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the declaration of independence of the Sudan on 1st January 1956. With the toleration of the British administration in the Sudan north Sudanese military units massacred demonstrating south Sudanese workers one year before the declaration of independence.

Two generations of the Dinka, Nuer, Bari, Zande and other peoples in southern Sudan have never really experienced peace. Some 2.5 million people have died there as a result of genocide since independence. The Nuba people also in the Nuba region of Kordofan on the south Sudanese border were from 1987 until 2003 victims of genocide. This destruction of some 500,000 people was documented by the UN special correspondent Gaspar Biro.

The Islamist-Arab military regime practises genocide up to the present day, this time in the west Sudan in the Darfur region. There up to 400,000 Muslim black Africans have fallen victim to the crimes against humanity, committed by the Arab militia and the troops of the military regime. There and on the east coast of the Sudan in the country of the Beja the killing goes on day by day.

The Sudan is in the eyes of the GfbV a prime example of the wrong turnings taken by state development in many parts of black Africa. The British colonial power formed the Sudan arbitrarily out of black African and Arab-speaking parts without any regard for the right to a voice of the black African majority. Western democracies and communist dictatorships alike supported for decades the changing Arab-Islamist central governments led by parliaments or the military in Khartoum, they delivered weapons and provided experts.

„In this way the international community of states and the United Nations have constantly failed to do anything to stop these crimes against humanity and to bring lasting peace to the people,” says the President of the GfbV, Tilman Zülch. The only success to date has been the peace treaty pushed through by the USA in January 2005 for the South Sudan. It at least put an end to the genocide which has lasted with certain breaks since 1955 against the black African population in this part of the country. But this peace process is also in danger as long as the international community tolerates the continuing genocide in Darfur. Only a federally organised and democratically ruled Sudan with a regional self-government of the black African and Arab population will be able to maintain the national unity of the Sudan.