Sudan letter misleading
The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Re: What's really going on in Darfur, Dec 19.
The letter from Faiza Taha, the ambassador of Sudan, was the most misleading carried in the Citizen in a long while.
For example, she correctly mentions that the precise number of deaths in Darfur over the past four years is unknown, but fails to add that among the hundreds of thousands of civilian victims, about half were killed by agents of her government and the rest died of related causes such as starvation.
On the terrible issue of rape, numerous African women and girls as young as eight in Darfur have been attacked by allies of the regime in Khartoum. Similarly in Bosnia, sexual assault was used by racists there as an instrument of ethnic cleansing. During the events of April to June, 1994 in Rwanda, as many as 300,000 women and girls were raped with similar motivation. It is hardly a coherent response to this phenomenon for your writer to point at the high number of criminal assaults in Western countries.
Last month in New York, an international citizens tribunal headed by Nobel literature Laureate Wole Soyinka unanimously found President Omar el-Bashir of Sudan to be guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
As a participant in that event, I'm convinced that if enough persons will watch the brief comments of Judge Gloria White-Hammond after the mock trial, the killing and raping in Darfur will be stopped. Her comments can be read on the website judgmentongenocide.org/hammond.html.
David Kilgour, Ottawa |
