From The Other Journal:
The calculated savagery of Khartoum’s campaign has been stunning. As Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times reported in February, a document seized by the African Union from a Janjaweed official outlined in chilling detail official government policy. Demanding “execution of all directives from the president of the Republic,” it called upon commanders to “change the demography of Darfur and make it devoid of African tribes.” Dated August 2004, the document encouraged “killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur.”
Terribly effective, this strategy resulted in near-total ethnic cleansing in the areas in which it occurred, leaving over two and a half million people bereft of sustenance and vulnerable to continuing attacks, with the lives of even more at risk. The only reason violence has abated recently, as noted by Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, is that “there are not many villages left to burn down and destroy.”
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