While all aid organizations had to pull out their teams from the area and no foreign journalists have been allowed to stay and to report about the ongoing atrocities, Ryan Boyette and his network of 14 citizen journalists were the only ones on site to inform about the sustained genocide in the Sudanese Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan. By means of photos, videos and testimonies from survivors and eyewitnesses they have been documenting the Khartoum regime’s new war against the Nuba peoples. They successfully forwarded the critical information material to Western media – namely to the Enough Project and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative with its Satellite Sentinel Project – and helped them to understand what was going on
As 20% of the Sudanese oil deposits is located in this Abyei region (Abyei’s status is not in accordance with the CPA and the Abyei-Protocol and the referendum on its territorial and political affiliation is still pending – as shown by the former National Minister of Cabinet Affairs of the Sudan: Luka Biong Deng recently), Sudan’s NPC and their President Al-Bashir are creating facts to avoid the loss of this area. As long as the Nuba Mountain region belongs to the North Sudan, the NPC does not have to share the oil revenues of this area with the South. Since the disastrous nomination of the ICC-indicted war criminal Ahmed Haroun as governor of South Kordofan (instead of the popular Commander Abdelaziz Adam Alhilu, the hero of Sudan’s civil war and current head of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA-North)), armed rebellion did spread and gave rise to the North Sudanese strongmen to enforce their exploiting economic interests to a most ferocious and fatal extent. Several hundred thousand people did leave their homeland already and Ryan Boyette and his journalist colleagues reported military strikes such as ground and air attacks – even the alleged use of chemical weapons and the detection of mass-graves.
Still unresolved and critically to be examined are the issues of the UNMIS transformation and their new tasks on both sides of the new border between North and South Sudan. While “in support of the new nation, the Security Council established a successor mission to UNMIS – the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) – a Petition of Women and Children of Nuba Mountains/South Kordofan is publicly accusing the Egyptian UNMIS-members in South Kordofan to support the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and to expose “civilians’ lives who fled their homes due to war to ethnic cleansing and execution.”
Read more:
The Man Who Stayed Behind by Nicholas D. Kristof (New York Times)
The Citizen Journalists on the Front Lines in Sudan (enoughproject.org)
Petition by the Women and Children of Nuba Mountains/South Kordofan, June 28, 2011
(freesouthsudanmediacenter.com)
Support the people of South Kordofan and visit the website of the Enough Project’s “Sudan Now” to send a letter to Secretary Clinton. Urge her to take immediate action to address the crisis in South Kordofan!
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by atsil
