"In South Sudan, cry of ‘freedom’ rings; After decades of struggle, misery, a nation is born" by Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times / July 10, 2011
JUBA, South Sudan - A new nation was being born in what used to be a forlorn, war-racked patch of Africa, and to many it seemed nothing short of miraculous. After more than five decades of an underdog, guerrilla struggle and two million lives lost, the Republic of South Sudan, Africa’s 54th state, was about to declare its independence in front of a who’s who of Africa, including the president of the country letting it go: Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, a war-crimes suspect....
This new nation is being built on a guerrilla army - the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, whose field commanders are now South Sudan’s political leaders - and the amount of firepower here is unnerving.
Related: Sudan Shuts Down Israeli Weapons-Smuggling Site
Looks like it is going to be reopened for business.
No wonder East Africa is in such rotten shape.
By 9 a.m., the sun was dangerous. The faces, necks, and arms of the people packed thousands deep around a parade stand built for the occasion were glazed with sweat....
In a column of black polished steel, one brand-new Mercedes after another, came the African leaders: Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president; Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s; Meles Zenawi, prime minister of Ethiopia; Teodoro Obiang, Equatorial Guinea’s president and chairman of the African Union; Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president; and Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda, among others.
Related: Injecting Ethiopia Into Sudan
But, almost inexplicably, Bashir, who for years prosecuted a vicious war to keep the south from splitting off and to prevent this very day from happening, drew the loudest burst of applause when his motorcade rolled in. “It is not happiness,’’ explained Daniel Atem, dressed in a suit and tie for the occasion, a miniflag flying from his lapel. “If you are talking to your enemy, you cannot say, ‘You are bad.’ ’’ But, he added, “you know what is in your heart.’’
He just explained it.
From the mid-1950s, even before Sudan shook off its colonial yoke in 1956, the southern Sudanese were chafing for more rights. Sudan had an unusually clear fault line, reinforced by British colonizers, with the southern third mostly animist and Christian and the northern part majority Muslim and long dominated by Arabs.
Now you know which western intelligence agency left remnants in country.
The southern struggle blew up into a full-fledged rebellion in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s, and the Sudanese government responded brutally, bombing villages and unleashing Arab militias that massacred civilians and enslaved children.
Many of the same tactics associated with the crisis in Darfur, in Sudan’s west, in the mid-2000s, were tried and tested long before that here in southern Sudan. (The International Criminal Court has indicted Bashir on genocide charges for the Darfur massacres.)
And yet it was the "rebels who rose in 2003?"
The central government also sowed divisions among the southerners, turning ethnic groups against one another. Some of the worst violence, like the Bor massacre in 1991 when toddlers were impaled on fence posts, was internecine.
Christian groups had been championing the southern Sudanese since the 19th century. And their efforts paid off in 2000 when George W. Bush was elected president of the United States.
He elevated Sudan to the top of his foreign policy agenda, and in 2005, the American government pushed the southern rebels and the central government to sign a comprehensive peace agreement that guaranteed the southerners the right to secede.
It was JUST BUSH ADVANCING the GLOBALIST AGENDA, folks!
So how come KASHMIR hasn't been granted the right to secede?
The American-backed treaty set the stage for a referendum this January in which southerners voted by 98.8 percent for independence. At 1:20 p.m. yesterday, the southerners officially proclaimed their freedom.
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Related: Waiting ends for South Sudanese
I wonder which city is going to be their capital.
So for what other reason would the West want to split up Sudan?
".... Sudan (a Muslim nation with an independent foreign policy which supports Palestinian rights). To an overwhelming degree, the propaganda campaign behind the so-called “Darfur genocide campaign’ is the Israeli state and its political apparatus in the US, namely the Zionist Power Configuration. Most of the media celebrities, led by prominent Hollywood Zionist director Steven Spielberg, have engaged in an exercise of selective moral indignation – supporting Israel, while ignoring its starvation blockade of Gaza, supporting the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq while attacking China for its ‘immoral’ oil contracts with the Sudan.
The CPMAJO has focused on the Darfur ‘genocide’ because by doing so it favors the brutal separatists in southern Sudan, armed and advised by Israel, as a means of depriving pro-Palestinian Sudan of a large oil rich region in the south of the country. The Darfur campaign deliberately and systematically excludes any mention of the Israeli Supreme Court’s approval of Israel’s food and fuel blockade and deliberate prevention of the movement of medical personnel in Gaza and the West Bank, its approval of Israel’s practice of torture (‘forceful interrogations’), armed assaults on the vital infrastructure and civilian population centers of Gaza. Hollywood’s Darfur sideshow is a sham propaganda effort at selective humanitarian concern...."
Oh. OIL at the BOTTOM OF IT ALL, huh?
Better get the UN in there:
"UN approves 7,000 peacekeepers for South Sudan" July 08, 2011|Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press
The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a new peacekeeping force for South Sudan on Friday, assuring the world’s newest nation on the eve of its independence of military and police support to help maintain peace and security.
The council authorized the deployment of up to 7,000 military personnel and 900 international police, plus an unspecified number of U.N. civilian staff including human rights experts.
The council acted ahead of independence celebrations on Saturday in South Sudan’s capital Juba when the mainly ethnic African south officially breaks away from the Arab-dominated north whose capital is in Khartoum.
South Sudan’s independence is the culmination of a 2005 peace deal that ended more than two decades of civil war but there are fears the conflict could be reignited because troops from the north and south are facing off in the contested oil-rich border region of Abyei. Northern troops and forces loyal to the south are also fighting in Southern Kordofan, a state just over the border in the north.
That's why Sudan needed to be split up: access to oil.
“This is a strong signal of support to the new South Sudan,’’ Germany’s U.N. Ambassador Peter Wittig, the current council president, said after the vote. “The council believed that this was a substantial contribution to the security challenges facing South Sudan.’’
He said the Security Council is expected to give South Sudan another vote of confidence on July 13 by recommending its membership in the United Nations. The General Assembly is expected to approve South Sudan as the U.N.’s 193rd member state the following day.
The resolution establishes a new United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan on July 9 for an initial period of one year....
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That's one soldier for every refugee:
"7,000 Sudanese ousted from camp stir worry at UN" by Associated Press / June 29, 2011
GENEVA — The United Nations said yesterday that it is concerned about the fate of 7,000 Sudanese civilians last seen being forced by authorities to leave the protection of a UN compound in the tense border region between the North and South.
North Sudan authorities have denied requests by the global body to meet with the civilians, who are believed to have been taken to the nearby town of Kadugli in South Kordofan Province last week, said UN spokeswoman Corinne Momal-Vanian....
The civilians had been featured prominently in UN aid agency reports from Sudan in the days before June 20, the day they were allegedly ordered to leave the UN camp. An internal UN report said Sudanese intelligence agents — some posing as Red Crescent workers — told the civilians to go to Kadugli for an address by the local governor and to receive humanitarian aid. The refugees were threatened with forced removal from the camp if they did not comply.
The UN has been cautious about criticizing the north Sudanese government for fear of inflaming relations with Khartoum, on whose goodwill it depends for humanitarian access to the western region of Darfur and parts of the south. With South Sudan due to formally declare independence from the north on July 9, pockets of fighting have broken out between north Sudan government forces and elements of the southern military.
Also yesterday, Sudan’s government and Southern-allied opposition forces in North Sudan signed a framework agreement that called for the two sides to govern contested border states together and for opposition fighters to be absorbed into Sudan’s national army, The New York Times reported....
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And if you try to leave Sudan:
"Many smuggled migrants feared drowned off Sudan" July 06, 2011|Associated Press
KHARTOUM, Sudan - Scores of African smuggled migrants were feared drowned yesterday after a boat carrying them to Saudi Arabia caught fire off Sudan’s northeastern coast, a semiofficial news agency reported....
The Sudan Media Center said that the planning and execution of the migrant smuggling effort took place in Port Sudan, a main port in the impoverished country. Port Sudan is the capital of the Red Sea State....
The report said the owners of the boat, all Yemenis, have been arrested, although it gave no more details about them.
A second attempt to smuggle 247 migrants, mostly from Chad, Nigeria, Somalia, and Eritrea, also was uncovered in the same state, the report said, without elaborating.
Human trafficking is rife in Sudan as smugglers use locally manufactured boats and take advantage of lawless areas in the conflict-ridden country.
There have been several other incidents of illegal migrants drowning off the coast of Sudan on their way to nearby countries in past years, but the numbers have generally been smaller. Thousands of African migrants, especially Eritreans and Ethiopians, risk the dangerous routes to escape conflicts in their countries and to seek better lives in oil-rich states....
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