Ongoing Hunger, Genocide Plague Sudan
More than 200,000 people in Sudan's Darfur region are not getting the food they need to survive and some 650,000 people are beyond the reach of aid workers, according to the top U.N. humanitarian official.
"The way it is now it can not continue," Jan Egeland, U.N. Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs, said to the Security Council on Thursday, according to Voice of America. "We need security, which we do not have. We need a government that enables us to work and does not create obstacles to our work. We need a guerrilla (force) that does not specialize in hijacking relief trucks and fighting each other and displacing new people, which has happened in the past few weeks. And we need funding."
More than two million people have sought refuge in huge camps since the genocide in 2003. But only 20 percent of relief work in Darfur has been funded this year, according to Egeland, who, earlier this month, was prevented by the Sudanese government from visiting Darfur.
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Egeland told BBC he was blocked from not seeing the latest wave of "ethnic cleansing" against black Africans in South Darfur.
Such violent waves were reported by a former U.S. Marine, Brian Steidle, a witness of the genocide from September 2004 to February 2005.
''Whole tribes have been wiped out''
Visiting churches and college campuses around the country, Steidle has been spreading the word about the ongoing village burnings and destroyed families in the "Eyewitness to Genocide tour." The reality: a 21st century genocide.
In a recent visit to Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Fort Wayne, Ind., Steidle presented graphic photographs shot from vibrating helicopters and accounts that revealed a nonexistent cease-fire.
"Whole tribes have been wiped out," he said, according to the United Methodist News Service. "The scale of this - those numbers are unfathomable. This is a large-scale military operation for the purpose of wiping out all black Africans in Darfur."
More than two million people have been killed and more than four million displaced during the most recent 20-year civil war mainly between the Sudanese government and black African tribes.
"They do the most horrific things to these people," Steidle added. "They do not even look at these people as humans."
The former marine's tour will culminate with the Apr. 30 Rally to Stop Genocide in Washington, D.C. The tour and rally are part of the Million Voices for Darfur campaign, organized by the Save Darfur Coalition, an alliance of more than 155 faith-based, humanitarian and human rights groups.
