Written by: Beck
I've made this point so many times, people are likely getting tired of it. Abu Ghraib made front page headlines for a solid month. Where is the outrage, then, over the
genocide going on in the Darfur region of Sudan? For that matter, where's the reporting period?
Arab militias in Sudan are gang-raping and abducting girls as young as eight and women as old as 80, systematically killing, torturing, or using them as sex slaves, an Amnesty International report said on Monday.
Militias known as Janjaweed, which rights groups say are backed by the government, have been fighting rebels in Sudan's western Darfur region since last year, triggering one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
"When we tried to escape they shot more children," one woman identified only as A. told Amnesty researchers.
"They raped women, I saw many cases of Janjaweed raping women and girls. They are happy when they rape. They sing when they rape and they tell us that we are just slaves and that they can do with us how they wish."
As many as 30,000 people have been killed in Darfur and more than a million displaced, their homes bombed by government planes, their crops stolen.
In a report called "Rape as a Weapon of War," Amnesty outlines sexual violence against women it says is happening on a massive scale. It says Khartoum is actively violating its legal obligations to protect civilians. [ed: various bits of emphasis all mine]
Let me make sure I have this absolutely positively straight. It's OK when Arab gangs rape, torture, and kill tens of thousands of civilians, but Lyndie England tortures a few dozen prison inmates and it's the end of the fucking world?
What's more, while the mess in Abu Ghraib represents the actions of a relatively small group of people who were condemned by the US government and who will spend time in jail, the genocide in the Sudan is actually
sponsored by the Sudanese state.