NYT: U.N. Aide Says Sudan Is Tolerating Ethnic Cleansing [RSS]

The United Nations director for relief in Sudan said Friday that Arab militias were conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing to drive black Africans out of a border region of the country with the apparent tolerance of the Sudanese government.

Jan Egeland, the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said the armed groups were using “scorched earth tactics,” deliberately destroying food and humanitarian supplies and attacking refugee centers in a program of “systematic depopulation.”

“I consider this ethnic cleansing,” he said, estimating that 750,000 people had been forced from their homes and villages, tens of thousands had fled into neighboring Chad and 10,000 might have died.

Speaking to reporters after briefing the Security Council on the situation, he said he was sounding the alarm because it was “one of the most forgotten and neglected humanitarian crises in the world.”

This seems all too familiar.