SLM Condemns Guterres Meeting Bashir

RESPONSE BY SUDAN LIBERATION MOVEMENT LEADERSHIP TO UN SECRETARY GENERAL’S MEETING WITH SUDANESE PRESIDENT BASHIR.     

FEBRUARY, 9th, 2018

Mr. Secretary General Guterres,

The leadership of the SLM, takes the gravest offense at your recent meeting at the African Union Summit in Ethiopia with the wanted war criminal and genocidaire, Sudanese dictator, Omar al Bashir, and your staff excusing it as a matter of “operational necessity.” We are bewildered, incredulous and indeed, enraged by your cordial treatment of a mass murderer, extremist ideologue and oppressor of his people. Is it customary for someone holding your high office to help legitimize a blood soaked tyrant?

The Sudanese Foreign Ministry which cited your praise for Bashir’s efforts to bring peace to Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile State, is delighted by your friendly encounter with the only sitting president on earth indicted by the International Criminal Court for War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide, but one expects the prosecutors and investigators at the ICC do not share the same joy, for you have disgraced them, besmirched the principles of accountability under international law you are meant to uphold and shamed the very institution you represent, in its entirety. In so doing you have further disgraced yourself and made a mockery of our own office and ostensible standing as the global moral voice of civilized nations and peoples.

That your meeting should have taken place only a short time after the latest wanton attack by Sudanese government troops and their partner militias against innocent civilians, offered inadequate sanctuary by your so called peacekeepers, at the Hasahissa IDP camp in Zlingi, Western Darfur, resulting in over seventy casualties, is all the more damning. What is your answer to them? And can you reassure them, since the Sudanese regime has made such tangible progress towards an equitable peace, that they will under the able care of UNAMID continue to enjoy the same degree of safety and freedom from fear, once measures to reduce UNAMID’s troop strength by forty percent, under your watch, are implemented?

Might you instead better consider that UNAMID is a failed mission, a toothless lion, already in its present form understrength, with a laughable mandate, that does not correspond to reality, when there is no peace to keep and instead, reinforcements are sorely needed, just as a far more muscular peace enforcement mandate should have been adopted long ago? But we know better. Instead, UNAMID in its increasingly, diminished capacity and glaring ineffectiveness will undoubtedly remain the pliant and obsequious tool of the regime in Khartoum, a shield for killers, not protection for their victims, at best a cosmetic band aid for a patient requiring emergency open heart surgery. We never imagined a serving Secretary General of the United Nations would play handmaiden to appeasement.

Might we inquire what the specifics were of your stated “operational necessity” that made your meeting with al Bashir compulsory? Did you discuss his long warranted, permanent vacation at the Hague and how you might help facilitate bringing it about? Did you discuss an end to the humanitarian blockade imposed by Khartoum, where hunger and disease have become tools of war, that leave the millions in IDP camps enduring wretched conditions that can scarcely be labeled humane?

Did you request that the Sudanese Army and its partner thugs in the Rapid Support Forces cease their standard operating procedure of rape, summary executions and torture? Did you ask al Bashir for his fellow criminals in uniform to cease destroying water wells as another means to inflict suffering on civilians? Or was it that you requested free access to the barred international media and human rights, watchdog organizations and NGO aid groups? Will the dictatorship be building hospitals and clinics at your urging?

Perhaps, we may have overlooked that you may have asked the butcher of Sudan why for many weeks of late, there has been a significant buildup of government troops, armored vehicles and heavy weaponry in and around key areas of Darfur, and for what purpose have these reinforcements been deployed? We assume the artillery is for humanitarian purposes? Might we also ask if the death toll in Darfur was a subject of discourse? Because for reasons beyond our comprehension, when we have dug the graves, the UN has frozen the butcher’s bill at three hundred thousand dead, and left it unchanged since 2008, when the true figure of our fallen, the vast majority of them civilians, has nearly doubled. What is the reason for this callous denial of our humanity?

We would be further remiss, however, not to remind you of your own eloquent words, in the midst of an ongoing, state sponsored genocide in our country, as you also recently commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, with apparently no sense of irony or self-awareness.

“We must stand together against the normalization of hate. Whenever and wherever humanity’s values are abandoned, we are all at risk.”

Very fine words and laudable sentiments, Mr. Secretary, if your commitment to them did not seem as hollow to us as it appears now, given your reprehensible conduct in Addis Ababa. Darfur, South Kordofan, Blue Nile State and Sudan as a whole, all still at the mercy of a ruthless and corrupt, hardline Islamist and militarist dictatorship keeping an entire nation in bondage, hunger and terror, is exactly a landscape where humanity’s values are abandoned, but you willingly shook hands with the principal culprit whom oversees unpunished, the profound violation of the elemental concepts of human decency, you purport to defend. You sir, have normalized hate.

In so doing, one hopes you recognize the damage you have done to your own moral standing and ethical credibility, when your legacy at the helm of the United Nations is in its infancy. If you aspire to greatness, without reservation, we remind you that in order not to be villified by posterity, you not only owe every single, man, woman and child from Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile State, indeed all Sudanese who yearn for liberation, a heartfelt apology, you must all the more now act with alacrity and commitment, and demonstrate with tangible deeds your desire to help put an end to the tragedy of the Sudanese people. We will only recognize your contrition as sincere when you do so in a concrete manner and not before then, because the unceasing subjugation and slaughter of our people in all its brutality and horror, clouds our eyes with bitter tears. We long to drink from the well of freedom and democracy instead our throats are parched by injustice.

We do not wish to regard you as our enemy, as we do not make war on your so called peacekeepers, whom are, with rare exception, barely worthy of the title. We only bear arms against our oppressors with little more than our will to resist, a staunch belief in building a better tomorrow for our children and the subsequent generations to come, for which we lay down our lives without hesitation, as it is our God given right to live in peace and to prosper in the pluralist, non-sectarian society, free of institutional prejudice, zealotry and authoritarianism we seek to build, just as we will not apologize for resisting our extermination.

But when you are Secretary General of the United Nations, we not only expect but demand better from you. So we ask that you retrieve your own honor and sense of duty, that by your own hand you have so stained by breaking bread with a vile, genocidal, war criminal and enemy of humanity. 

If you do not, you will be recorded in history as the next successor and inheritor of the worst chapters of systemic failure and moral collapse by the United Nations, alongside the late Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, revealed as a former Nazi henchman complicit himself in genocide during the Second World War, former Netherlands Army Colonel, Thom Karremans, whom instead of standing and fighting as honor demanded at Srebrenica, drank brandy and toasted Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic and enabled him to perpetrate the worst genocidal act to take place on European soil since 1945, but most of all as ours is an African genocide, the shameful abandonment by the Security Council and the UN Secretariat of the heroic Canadian General Romeo Dallaire and his equally noble, forlorn UNAMIR peacekeepers during the Rwandan Genocide, whom courageously disobeyed orders in recognition of their duty preserving their dignity and humanity against impossible odds.

We know these page turnings in history, Mr. Secretary, do not think that because we live under the shadow of Antonov bombers, we have lost sight of our faculties, as you self-evidently did in Addis Ababa. Please do your job, Mr. Secretary, live up to your own words, and do not enable genocide again, lest you be damned for it, for all time.

Sincerely,

Abdul Wahid al Nur, Chairman Sudan Liberation Movement