Sudanese President Omar Bashir has launched an attack on international humanitarian agencies in the troubled Darfur region, calling them enemies in comments published yesterday. "Organizations operating in Darfur are the real enemies," the official Al-Anbaa daily quoted Bashir as saying, without elaborating. "The conspiracy against Darfur is not new," he added, in remarks to representatives of native administrations in Darfur.
The president also accused the West of fueling the 20-month conflict in the region that has left tens of thousands of people dead, displaced more than 1.4 million others from their homes and forced a further 200,000 into Chad. "Western countries are funding the unrest in Darfur," Bashir charged, adding that there were also other elements that wanted to "explode the situation" in the region, again without elaborating. He argued that those "claiming to be concerned" about the crisis were "liars and hypocrites. They are all enemies." Bashir and other officials in Khartoum have repeatedly accused NGOs of proselytizing in Sudan and charged that the West was fueling the conflict in a bid to plunder the country's resources.
| There's the real fear: that the NGOs will — even inadvertently — convert the locals to some sort of alternative to Islam and dictatorship. Once the rubes get the idea that "I can be more like them," there's the danger they'll bolt from the real liars and hypocrites who run Sudan. |
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