Politics

Dafur Emergency: A Challenge To Civilisation

With pain rocking through my whole body today, I cast a bitter glance back at what I called, the ‘tragedy of Dafur’ and decided to settle accounts with my fellow Africans on this matter.

President Omar el-Bashir has twisted history, invented a distortion in African lexicon and rammed it through our throats. Every mention of anything Sudanese these days sounds much more like ‘Sadness’, and every picture of the attrocious genocide of Dafur seems more like hearing or seeing the destruction wroth by ‘Sulphur’. Anytime I hear the word ‘Janjaweed’ it connotes an imagery of ‘Ganja-weed’ i.e Marijuana, no wonder, the trails of this militia of shame that diplaced 2 million people, leveled an estimated 2,000 villages and killed over 180,000 so horrified the UN that it had to stridently call for their trial by the International Criminal Court.

The Sudanese leader has suceeded in his 16-year rule, in turning Sudan into one of the poorest countries in the poorest continent in the world: one of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Sudan is now a giant Ghetto dotted all-over with refugee camps hosting millions.

The death of John Garang last Monday, in an helicopter crash would not change the tempo of the silent revolution that would end dictatorship and bring lasting peace to the 40million people of Sudan.

It is however a discernible and irrepressible truth that the insurgency by black Africans of Dafur, in February 2003 against alleged discrimination and oppression by the Khartoum government was the trigger.

This was one battle too much for a regime whose bucket was already overflowing with multiple conflicts, particularly, the two decade fatricidal war against the Southern Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA)led by Garang.

That battle exposed the under-belly of the Sudanese dragon and stopped the full-fledged speed of the Sudanese government from being the continental capital for the ‘Axis of Terrorism’ in Africa.

That battle sent the regime scampering for a desperate balance by hastily coming to the negotiating table and conceeding partial autonomy and power sharing with the SPLA.

It is now certain that the janjaweed and all its vicious attrocities of rape, murder, etc. has failed to break the will of Dafur for freedom, autonomy, democracy, peace and deverlopment. The bell tolls for the 16-year rule of el-Bashir. What Dafur started, Dafur would complete: and that is to sweep oppression and dictatorship off the landscape of Sudan- our Sudan.

Aderemi Ojikutu (Aderaskeey) is a Motivational Author and Youth Mentor. He is a minister of the Word of God. A political economist and political leader. He is President of the TREASURE WRITERS CLUB in Nigeria(http://treasurewriters.50megs.com). He is also the current President of the National Democratic Forum (N.D.F). He was National Mobilisation Officer of the National Association of Nigerian Students (N.A.N.S) for several years. A revolutionary of over two decades, he was also the political secretary of the defunct Nigerian Labour Party in 1991.

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