-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE NEW WORLD DISORDER Black leaders to protest Kofi Annan Decry 'complacency' toward genocide in Sudan
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: June 5, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern
The protest is planned for Wednesday in Boston, the evening before Annan will deliver a commencement address at Harvard University.
Sudan's cleric-backed National Islamic Front regime in the Arab and Muslim north declared a jihad on the mostly Christian and animist south in 1989. Since 1983, an estimated 2 million people have died from war and related famine. About 5 million have become refugees.
The current slaughter, however, is in Darfur, Western Sudan, where an estimated 30,000 have been killed. Most of the victims are black Muslims who do not support the radical Arab regime.
The protesters say Annan "must not stand by as genocide happens on his watch again, as it did in South Sudan and in Rwanda."
Demonstrators include Sudanese refugees and the groups My Sister's Keeper, the Black Ministerial Alliance, the North America Fashoda Association, the South Sudanese Community in America, the 10-Point Coalition, the American Anti-Slavery Group and the Sudan Campaign.
Rights groups, which call the situation in Darfur the "worst humanitarian crisis in the world," say along with the thousands dead, countless others have been raped, maimed and enslaved in militia raids taking place amid the Islamist government's "racist genocidal campaign against Sudan's black Muslim people."
The activists say villages are being attacked in the Shilluk Land and the Upper Nile Region of South Sudan "as the U.N. stands by."
Meanwhile, despite the peace accord in the South, the protesters say, tens of thousands of Christian and Animist Africans remain as slaves to Arab masters.
