On Sudanese President Omar Bashir and the August 2008 Kalma massacre

We, the undersigned, strongly condemn the criminal act which Sudanese President Omer Al-Bashir’s regime indiscriminately carried out among the innocent internally displaced population of Kalma Camp in Southern Darfur at the dawn of August 25, 2008 killing at least 64 individuals mostly women, children, and elderly and injuring over a hundred others. We also appeal to the international community to stop the political compromises and do more to protect the survivors of Darfur genocide in Kalma and other internally displaced camps, and categorically stand by the charges which the International Criminal Court (ICC) laid on president Al-Bashir who not only never regretted the horrendous crimes his regime has been committing against innocent civilians for over five years, but also always minimized the seriousness of the crimes committed and further unleashed his security agents, Janjaweed militia, and army to commit many more every time. We again commend the strong statement the United Nations-African Union Mission for Darfur has issued on Kalma Massacre, acclaim the position of Darfur officials who have resigned from their handout portfolios in protest against these coldblooded massacres and call on the remaining Darfur officials in the government to do the same, and urge the ICC to immediately issue the indictment warrant against president Al-Bashir.

Our sources underline that a heavily armed force composed of security agents, militiamen, and regular army individuals came on 100 vehicles at the dawn of August 25, 2008 and opened fire on the camp. The camp population tried to defend their camp with sticks, knives, spears, and stones as the UNAMID team pointed out. Consequently, the result was disastrous. The regime’s force has murdered 64 individuals of the camp residents and injured over 170 others many of whom later died in Nyala’s hospitals. 13 more residents were believed to have drowned as the terror which the regime’s force spread in the camp forced some of its residents to run to the nearby river hoping to make across it, but 13 of them could not make it to the opposite bank of the river and are believed to have been drowned. Some of the women murdered were pregnant and some children were shot dead from their mothers’ backs. After all, for several hours, president Al-Bashir’s regime denied access to the camp for international aid organizations, such as Medecins sans Frontieres, to rescue the wounded because they wanted to hide their crime, and fabricated a plane hijack to divert the attention on the massacre it committed in Kalma Camp.

Of course, the residents of the Kalma are survivors of genocide that has been in process since 2001: they survived the attacks which the Janjaweed and regime’s security agents launched on their villages and towns in 2001-2002 killing residents, burning homes, and looting properties; survived the bombings and ground attacks on the remaining villages and towns in 2003-2004; and survived the regime’s ban of aid organizations’ operations from the camps which they raised in the vicinities of the city of Nyala in 2004 after the indiscriminately and systematically organized attacks on their villages had forced them to flee to Nyala. The small camps later merged and became the Greater Kalma Camp. The regime does not want Kamla and all the other IDP camps to exist because they serve as tangible evidence of the process of genocide it launched since the year 2001and, it has, therefore, been employing all means to disperse the populations of the camps to slumps of different cities of Darfur and beyond because the regime already gave the IDPs’ home areas and farms to Arab elements it invited from countries such as Chad, Niger, Mauritania, etc.

We believe that the international community is not doing enough to stop the Darfur genocide that has been in process for so long in an era of “Genocide Never Again”. We are, therefore, calling upon the international community to stop compromising Darfur genocide with political and economic interests. Finally, we repeatedly stress our strong support of the charges which the International Criminal Court’s Chief Prosecutor laid against Omer Al-Bashir and call for an immediate arrest warrant against him because any delay of Omer Al-Bashir’s indictment simply means the continuation of genocide.