Lives in the balance –<\/p>\n
Scorched-Earth Strategy Returns to Darfur – New York Times<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n SULEIA, Sudan \u2014 The janjaweed are back. <\/p>\n They came to this dusty town in the Darfur<\/a> region of Sudan on horses and camels on market day. Almost everybody was in the bustling square. At the first clatter of automatic gunfire, everyone ran. <\/p>\n The militiamen laid waste to the town \u2014 burning huts, pillaging shops, carrying off any loot they could find and shooting anyone who stood in their way, residents said. Asha Abdullah Abakar, wizened and twice widowed, described how she hid in a hut, praying it would not be set on fire. <\/p>\n \u201cI have never been so afraid,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n The attacks by the janjaweed, the fearsome Arab militias that came three weeks ago, accompanied by government bombers and followed by the Sudanese Army, were a return to the tactics that terrorized Darfur in the early, bloodiest stages of the conflict. <\/p>\n Such brutal, three-pronged attacks of this scale \u2014 involving close coordination of air power, army troops and Arab militias in areas where rebel troops have been \u2014 have rarely been seen in the past few years, when the violence became more episodic and fractured. But they resemble the kinds of campaigns that first captured the world\u2019s attention and prompted the Bush administration to call the violence in Darfur genocide.<\/p>\n Aid workers, diplomats and analysts say the return of such attacks is an ominous sign that the fighting in Darfur, which has grown more complex and confusing as it has stretched on for five years, is entering a new and deadly phase \u2014 one in which the government is planning a scorched-earth campaign against the rebel groups fighting here as efforts to find a negotiated peace founder.<\/p>\n >>>>>><\/p>\n Pressure is mounting on Sudan over Darfur. In January, a long-sought hybrid United Nations and African Union<\/a> peacekeeping force began working in Darfur, but the Sudanese government\u2019s quibbling over which countries the troops will come from and bureaucratic delays have stalled the force\u2019s deployment. <\/p>\n Sudan\u2019s biggest trading partner and ally, China, has also come under pressure from advocates who have linked the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer to the fighting in Darfur. China has been more publicly critical of the Sudanese government in recent weeks. Sudan has also been trying to improve its relationship with the United States, and last week, President Bush\u2019s new special envoy to Sudan, Richard S. Williamson, visited Darfur and the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, meeting with President Omar al-Bashir<\/a>. Any improvement in relations, he said, would be contingent on tangible improvements in the humanitarian situation. <\/p>\n \u201cSince the first of the year another 75,000 people in Darfur have been displaced,\u201d Mr. Williamson said in a telephone interview. \u201cThat is more than a thousand a day. There are not going to be any changes until that reverses.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lives in the balance – Scorched-Earth Strategy Returns to Darfur – New York Times SULEIA, Sudan \u2014 The janjaweed are back. They came to this dusty town in the Darfur region of Sudan on horses and camels on market day. Almost everybody was in the bustling square. At the first clatter of automatic gunfire, everyone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6217,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3951\/revisions\/6217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n