SLM/A-AW URGENT INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIQUE ON SUDAN’S CRISIS (January 7th, 2022)

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The leadership of the Sudan Liberation Movement & Army unequivocally condemns the ongoing multiple criminal actions perpetrated by the illegitimate ruling military junta in Khartoum, de facto headed by coup d’etat leaders General Abdel Fattah al Bourhan and General Mohamad Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemeti, against the oppressed people of Sudan. In a long list of egregious offenses that among them witness the unceasing ferocity and gangster conduct of the state military, paramilitaries, partner militias, police and intelligence officers in their indiscriminate use of lethal force, torture, rape and arbitrary arrest against unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators throughout Sudan, alongside an upsurge of as brutal wanton killing of civilians in Darfur by the same actors, to our great alarm there is now the renewed specter of famine also looming in Darfur due to deliberate government action.

The massive looting of vital food supplies in World Food Program warehouses in Darfur and the subsequent suspension of alimentary aid by the UN in North Darfur now presents the danger of starvation to more than two million people. That the thievery was openly carried out by uniformed members of the Rapid Support Forces, their allied Arab militias and former rebel fighters now in government service, loyal to the authority of both their turncoat leaders, betrayers of the Peoples Revolution, Darfur Governor Minni Minnawi and Sudanese Finance Minister Gibril Ibrahim, cannot be explained away as a random act.

?It was a targeted deliberately planned operation that echoes the proven tactics of the former regime of deposed President Omar al Bashir, where hunger and a purposeful blockade of all humanitarian supplies, was always a weapon of choice in the unending Darfur genocide alongside a scorched earth policy, where death by starvation and disease played as key a role in the destruction and mass murder of Darfur, as did the military arsenal of the state. Clearly the intention remains the same, to break the will of the people to resist tyranny.

?As the United Nations contrary to all logic and the true situational security assessment of Darfur, ignored all of our repeated pleas not to withdraw the UNAMID peacekeeping contingent, on the hallucinatory fallacy of what was always a purely cosmetic peace process and improved safety conditions in Darfur that rationalized its drawdown, both endorsed by the UN Security Council and parallel campaigns by the Sudan Troika countries, the United States, United Kingdom, Norway,?as well as the European Union and African Union; the UN is not without shared culpability in enabling the security vacuum in Darfur, by its collective incoherent judgement, that has now brought forth predictable lethal results.

As emblematic of this failure is the insistence that the genocidaire Rapid Support Forces and their allied militias would provide security for the people of Darfur. Killers cannot become protectors through enthusiastic semantics. The skewed logic of it is comparable to deploying Second World War Nazi SS death squads and their collaborationist auxiliary police, fellow genocidaires, to protect the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.

Because of the kleptocratic and disastrous governance of the current authoritarian regime in Khartoum, that is in practice a continuation of Bashir’s ruinous legacy, already half of the population of Sudan is food insecure. But the humanitarian catastrophe that awaits Darfur, if prompt corrective action is not taken, evokes a present-day waking nightmare of imminent mass starvation, comparable to past famines in Biafra and Ethiopia.

Darfur can become the next Yemen. But in this instance blame will not only rest with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, valued Western allies, who fittingly also shamelessly bolster al Bourhan and Hemeti, as they did for long al Bashir. Khartoum’s actions and the barely hidden hand of its enablers and inaction by the West will meld again in catastrophic symbiosis.

With the utmost sense of urgency we call upon the UN Security Council, the Troika countries, the EU and African Union to pass a joint emergency resolution and to not suspend indispensable food distribution in North Darfur but instead to take prompt measures to bring in new food supplies commensurate to the need, with an interim international security force to ensure they are not looted again. We would offer our complete cooperation with such a force under a renewed proper mandate that is no longer deaf, dumb and blind. Inaction is not acceptable and if the so-called international community will sit on its hands, it too will bear an undeniable share of responsibility in manufacturing a man-made famine that can result in a vast death toll. Indifference will amount to complicity.

?We also call upon the International Criminal Court and all countries that practice extra-territorial law to note command responsibility for the looting of the WFP warehouses in Darfur, as a conscious method of repression and tool of war by other means, that can cost untold lives, borne by al Bourhan, Hemeti, Minnawi and Ibrahim, all awaiting their time in the dock at the Hague for documented past and present war crimes and crimes against humanity.

?If swift measures are not taken to prevent mass famine in Darfur, the UN will be writing a new dark chapter of infamy by its paralysis that will haunt the conscience of the world, as it did in its moral and operational failure in the Rwandan and Srebrenica genocides. We must see tangible action not mere words and the UN is only as capable as the five permanent members of the Security Council allow it to be, where Russia and China must also be held to account for their long-standing aid to successive generations of Sudanese tyrants.

We urge the UN and the great powers that drive it, to act in the name of humanity and common decency, before it is too late and Darfur’s plight reaches a new pinnacle of unspeakable suffering and horror. History will record whether you took the necessary moral action or turned away and aided the butchers of their own people, by a demonstrable lack of courage and humanist commitment.

?The censure of the Sudanese dictatorship by the UN, Sudan Troika and the EU, over flagrant human rights abuses and widespread atrocities becomes hollow posturing if the international community allows Darfur to starve to death. Only swift humanitarian intervention will give true meaning to the moral high ground global power brokers provide lip service to.

?There is no substitute for tangible life saving measures. Such cognitive dissonance becomes all the more glaring in the face of the West’s draconian and inhumane policy towards Sudanese refugees fleeing state terror, that has included EU funding for the genocidaire RSF for border control, as well as support for the monstrous Libyan Coast Guard that regularly guns down Sudanese refugees on sight. The paradox between the West’s ostensible good intensions and their impact on the reality Sudan endures, remains a deep chasm of inconsistency and counterintuitive systemic failure. It is deeply painful for us Sudan foreign policy dysfunction continues, when we struggle to build a new Sudan on the model of Western democracies, we also seek to form a strong fraternal, strategic alliance with. You are the leaders of the Free World and why is your leadership acumen not in evidence?

As the late beloved, moral giant of the South African Anti-Apartheid struggle, our African continent sadly lost recently, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, stated so eloquently: “When you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

But inaction in the face of famine, is worse than neutrality, it is a glaring absence of moral fortitude and a betrayal of the very principles Western democracies purport to uphold, that our people will pay an unbearable price for, if resolve is not shown. We demand you adjust your moral compass bearing and take critical action without deflection or equivocation this very moment.

?Sincerely,

Abdul Wahid al Nur

Chairman of the Sudan Liberation Movement and Commander in Chief, Sudan Liberation Army.

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