Sudan on the brink

This is probably the farthest from our minds right now. Or at just about any other time of the year. Sudan? What’s going on there, and who’s paying any attention to that?

Respectively, the possibility of a looming civil war and potential massacres of whole populations….and big name activists who sometimes don’t find themselves on the same side of a human rights argument.

I Am Whole Life, that’s the fuller answer.

January 9, 2011 will be remembered as an important milestone in the 21st Century. If the planned date for a referendum on independence for Southern Sudan becomes a return to war and mass slaughter and enslavement of defenseless refugees, women and children, we have to ask what hope we have for our century.

Will the indiscriminate killing of women and children, wholesale massacres, forced deportations, systematic destruction of populations based on ethnicity, organized killing in the service of ideology become a part of Southern Sudan’s history or a part of all of our future?

With the referendum days away, Khartoum has upped the ante and begun bombarding refugees from the air and is attacking helpless civilians with HIND helicopters. The attacks are being aimed at voter registration points and are designed to incite fear and panic to disrupt the referendum. Over 15,000 Southern-Sudanese have been displaced by the most recent attacks and are in desperate need of aid.

‘Tis the season.