Nina Shea, NationalReview online
Sudan’s president, Gen. Omar al-Bashir — an indicted war criminal — is now ferociously targeting the one million Nuba and various other peoples of oil-rich Southern Kordofan. Though this area sided with South Sudan in the civil war that raged from 1983 to 2005, it was, under the terms of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005, left behind when the South seceded last month. Bashir wants to ensure that Southern Kordofan’s oil fields remain under Khartoum’s control.
Ever since Bashir seized power in a 1989 military coup, with support from the National Islamic Front, he has waged perpetual, total war against his own people — first the Nuba, then South Sudan, then Darfur in the west, then the Beja people in the east, and now again the Nuba.
Since fighting broke out in Southern Kordofan on June 5, Khartoum has made it impossible for foreign aid groups to go there, and the region has never been on foreign journalists’ beaten path. Nevertheless, we have glimpses of the atrocities now taking place thanks to leaked U.N. reports and intermittent accounts by church representatives.
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