Staunch Human Rights Defenders

African states often represent as anti-human-rights respecting in the worst possible scenarios of tribal tyrannies against other tribes in ages-old struggles of territorial advantage, resentment and pure, simple hatred leading to incessant wars. Uganda was a miserable place for its people under the notorious Idi Amin whose dictatorial brutality became legendary. His successors have barely been an improvement.

Africa knows atrocities, its various parts commit them against one another with impressively dreadful regularity. From Somalia to Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo to Rwanda, Ethiopia to Liberia, man's inhumanity to man has been expressed time and time again. Sudan's war against its own in Darfur, with Khartoum committing itself to stifling a rebellion by mass murder and rape has seen the International Criminal Court finding its president guilty of war crimes.

Sudan's President Omar al Bashir was the first sitting president indicted by the International Criminal Court for his campaign of mass murder, rape and pillage against Darfurian civilians. The warrant for his arrest came behind that for Sudan's Minister of State and the Janjaweed militia leader, instrumental in terrorizing Darfur's population by the ICC. None of the accused have been surrendered to stand trial before the ICC.

And because other African countries and Muslim-governed countries support one of their own, none would commit to arresting the accused when occasion permitted -- attendance at Arab League meetings, for example -- and none have been brought to justice even while Darfuris continue to live by their millions as displaced persons relying on humanitarian aid for survival -- still oppressed by the Sudanese government.


It should hardly be surprising, then, that Uganda's Joseph Kony, one of the most viciously brutal of all African rogue militia leaders, responsible for the deaths of countless thousands of people, for the abduction and enslavement of children in their thousands -- of vulnerable helplessness to resist being turned into child 'soldiers' and sex slaves -- would be protected by Sudan.

Not only has Kony much in common with al Bashir through his murderous onslaughts of innocents, social upheaval and atrocities committed without conscience of responsibility, he also enjoys the distinction of having been indicted, like al Bashir of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in the Hague, in 2005.

Sudan, a country whose reputation for brutality under its Muslim-minority Arab-dominated government, has given haven to the African warlord Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army. "The enclave is currently controlled by Sudan, and numerous eyewitness reports indicate that elements of the Sudanese Armed Forces in Kafia Kingi have actively sheltered senior LRA commanders there and provided them with limited material support."

"According to LRA defectors and other sources, LRA leader Joseph Kony himself first travelled to the Kafia Kingi enclave in 2010. He returned to Kafia Kingi in 2011 and was present there throughout parts of 2012", from which protected place he was enabled to "continue(d) to direct LRA attacks against civilians in neighbouring countries and issue new orders for LRA fighters."
Resolve...U.S.-based watchdog group

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which holds great sway and influence through a well-established voting bloc in the United Nations, and which has much to contribute through its members to the UN's Human Rights Council has not seen fit to issue a condemnation against Sudan, nor take action to remedy its own reputation for defending human-rights defilers among its own membership.