SLM COMMUNIQUE 27TH AU SUMMIT, KIGALI RWANDA, 2016

SLM COMMUNIQUE 27TH AU SUMMIT, KIGALI RWANDA, 2016





It should not be necessary for fellow Africans to remind the African Union of its moral duty, its obligation to defend all the people of our continent and to uphold its founding pledge to serve the greater good from the Maghreb to the Cape of Good Hope, in the spirit of solidarity, brotherhood, unity and justice for all.

Clearly, however, this intended aspiration remains a distant dream as yet again the African Union, with the 27th AU summit underway in Rwanda , presents to the world an unwitting caricature of itself, through the spectacle of an indicted war criminal and genocidaire walking freely in Kigali, as if this was nothing untoward.

Therefore the leadership of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM AW) condemns in the strongest possible terms the presence of the blood spattered Sudanese tyrant Omar al-Bashir in the Rwandan capital, alongside all the AU heads of state in attendance, from whom not a single cry of protest emanates from their lips.

Were giants such as Nelson Mandela, John Garang, Jomo Kenyatta, Samora Machel, Patrice Lumumba and Thomas Sankara alive to witness such a shameful display, no doubt they would not believe their own eyes.

It is as astonishing that you sir, Rwandan President Paul Kagame publicly speak of your friendship with al Bashir, render him state honors and so brazenly make light of the International Criminal Court’s legitimate indictments against him for War Crimes, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity perpetrated in Darfur, unceasing there today and mirrored again in the ongoing plight of the people of South Kordofan and the Blue Nile.

Did you not lead a resistance movement to end one of the ugliest genocides of the 20th Century, to deliver the Rwandan nation from the nightmare the previous regime and the machetes of the Interhamwe militias inflicted upon your people in an orgy of slaughter that shocked the world؟ You know the stink of death well, personally. You saw the endless piles of corpses in your own country when you led the Rwandan Patriotic Front to victory to stop the carnage. And are you not bound by the Rwandan Constitution which you were instrumental in reforming to intervene if another genocide arises and not just in Rwanda؟ And are we mistaken in the knowledge that genocidaires that participated in the Rwandan Genocide were willingly subjected to prosecution by the ICC by the Rwandan State؟ But now that you sit in a president’s chair, do you consider that the dead of Sudan, have less human worth than your own fallen؟ Or is it that we are not African enough for you؟

You continue to condemn the French government for it’s complicity in Rwanda’s darkest days but in the same breath you embrace al Bashir whose soldiers and paramilitary militias have butchered 500,000 people in Darfur, the vast majority of them innocent civilians, where the bulk of the victims are women and children. Do you grasp the lurid hypocrisy of your gesture؟ You have in a single day evaporated your moral standing as both a liberator and a statesman, worthy of the name.

And what of your soldiers in the United Nations Mission in Darfur؟ Your troops constitute the largest serving national contingent serving in UNAMID and they are daily witness to the routine horrors, privations and suffering endured by the civilian population, just as their fellow so called peacekeepers in the South African and Ugandan forces may observe, though they all do little to stop it.

Are you truly unaware of the nature of the tragedy playing out every single day on the ground؟ Could you possibly be so uninformed, or is it just a matter of convenient, cynical and self-serving denial, for you and indeed all the other AU heads of state, to dismiss the findings of the ICC, lest one day the Hague will focus attention on the same august members of the AU؟ And how many nations of the AU comprise functional, transparent democracies؟ Is it then a matter of most of the AU states consisting of dysfunctional and corrupt dictatorships protecting themselves by protecting al Bashir؟

Perhaps this is our great failing as a liberation movement, because we fight in the name of democracy. We fight to build a free and pluralistic society where nobody is above the law and anyone may be held accountable for their crimes. We fight to rid our people once and for all of the burden of dictatorship, so that the injustice we confront today may not be visited upon future generations.

For all that Africa had to stomach the bitter legacy of centuries of rapacious and brutal colonialism that left the continent on its knees, we in the SLM, do not don rose colored glasses when we consider the reality that has plagued too much of our beloved continent since colonialism fell, the grim truth of so many false, insincere liberators and would be reformers that once in power only enriched themselves, served their own vanity and became presidents for life with a scornful disregard for the common people they purported to serve. This is the greatest modern tragedy of Africa, African leaders betraying their own African people. And if a new imperialism persists in a different guise today by outside powers, it is these same African traitors that enable them. Bashir is precisely such a man and all those who break bread with him, shield him, lie for him and excuse his barbarous conduct pretending it is acceptable, are little better than him, in so doing. Now, President Kagame and all of al Bashir’s apologists, you wear that stain upon you and it is the mark of Cain.

We do not for a second pretend either that our crisis is the sole crisis in Africa, not even in Sudan do we close our eyes to the suffering of our brothers and sisters in South Kordofan and the Blue Nile, because we understand that their struggle for survival and dignity is a painful echo of our own and we correctly regard one another as comrades in arms.

It is with the same heavy hearts that we look upon the unending torment of South Sudan where a once bright promise keeps degenerating into internecine bloodshed and fierce factionalism that prevents hope from taking hold. But in this too, the regime in Khartoum has played upon the frailties and divisions in Juba and delights in contributing to the mayhem to strengthen its own hand, no matter that ultimate responsibility for creating and resolving the crisis of South Sudan lies with its own leadership. John Garang would no doubt be most pained over the current state of affairs in South Sudan.

Nor do we ignore the danger Burundi faces, the unceasing agony of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the pain of the Central African Republic and not least Mali, Chad, Niger, Cameroon, Nigeria, Libya and Tunisia all struggling to contain and defeat the scourge of Salafi extremism. This resonates for us in particular because we too confront both an Islamist dictatorship and a pathological and racist extremist ideology that rationalizes our extermination and enslavement as permissible. And as adherents of Sufism we practice the most tolerant and progressive strain of Islam, grounded in our civic commitment to a staunch secularism. For this we also suffer religious persecution of a Medieval variety, for the apostasy of daring to forge a free society, not an authoritarian, kelptocrat, autocracy animated by a virulent and fanatical ideology. We do not remotely understand why almost none of you regard us nor treat us as natural allies in a common fight against extremism., given what we endure and by whom.

Thus as a people subjected to genocide and as a movement fighting against a radical, extremist demagogue whom actively supports, engenders and enables too many terrorist groups to list and not merely Islamist ones, given Khartoum’s continued sponsorship of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, we wonder why we remain so invisible to you and so abandoned by you. Why have you forgotten us؟ Do you judge us expendable؟

Given that the Rwandan government lacks the moral courage to arrest Omar al Bashir, just as we earlier witnessed the South African government and its own high court at odds over bringing resolute legal action against the Sudanese dictator as demanded by international law, we implore the main body of the AU or any individual government within it, with greater spine than shown in Kigali, to issue arrest orders for al Bashir and at minimum bar him from entering their territory and making him unwelcome.

We further demand that the AU support our call for the immediate cessation of violent aggression by the Sudanese regime’s military and security forces and partner militias against the civilian populations of Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile State, an end to the blockade of all humanitarian and food supplies, the freeing of all political prisoners, the cessation of extra-judicial, summary executions and institutionalized use of torture and rape, the granting of free access to international non-governmental aid organizations, media and human rights observer groups and a resolution for a much strengthened combined AU-UN peacekeeping force with a far more muscular peace enforcement mandate that allows for the use of lethal military force against regime forces (or any other parties) that violate accepted standards of conduct under the statutes of the Geneva Conventions. And such a mandate should stipulate that lethal military force may even be used as a preventive measure, if the intent and deployment of aggressive protagonists is clearly identified. If such a mandate is adopted, in good faith armed SLM forces will return to their base camps and observe an immediate ceasefire, unless provoked into acts of self-defense should they come under attack.

And if the AU will not recognize the authority of the ICC, we then call upon the AU to forthwith draft a resolution where Omar al Bashir may be tried in a third country within the AU, under AU jurisdiction and be held accountable in an African court of law on extra-territorial criminal charges, where impartial international monitors from neutral countries may freely observe the legal proceedings against him to ensure they may be undertaken without hindrance or undue outside or internal influence or manipulation.

We ask you to do nothing more than what justice, honor and reason demand.

Abdul Wahid al Nur, Chairman Sudan Liberation Movement

أبرز عناوين
سودانيز اون لاين صباح اليوم الموافق 17 يوليو 2016اخبار و بيانات
• رئيس حزب المؤتمر السوداني عمر يوسف الدقير يغادر الى فرنسا للمشاركة فى اجتماعات نداء السودان
• اعتقال الصحفي الفريد تعبان بواسطة جهاز الأمن بجنوب السودان
• مذكرة تحمل ألف توقيع ترفض فرض رسوم على المدارس الحكومية
• فرنسا :في عيدها الوطني الارهاب يضرب بلا رحمة
• اعلان تحذيري من طلاب وخريجي وأساتذة جامعة الخرطوم
• في القمة الافريقية.. جنوب السودان الهدوء الهش والجوع يهدد الملايين
• منظمات جنوبية تدعو البشير للتدخل لإحتواء الصراع بدولة جنوب السودان
• القائم بالأعمال التركي بالإنابة يعرب عن شكر حكومة بلاده للسودان
• مذكرة من الف شخص ترفض الرسوم الدراسية وتطالب بزيادة ميزانية التعليم ومجانيته
• محاكمة شبكة من القوات النظامية تعمل في تهريب البشر
• البشير: السودان يقف صفاً واحداً مع أردوغان
• إجلاء (3) آلاف سوداني من جوبا خلال أربعة أيام
• تصريح صحافي من الإمام الصادق المهدي رئيس حزب الأمة القومي
• القيادي بالمؤتمر الشعبي أبوبكر عبد الرازق: علي عثمان لا يملك إمكانيات لمناظرة الترابي
• بالصور: يشهد أكبر مشاركة نسائية سودانية المؤتمر الدولي الثالث للهجرة بلندن
• حركة العدل والمساواة تدين الإنقلاب الفاشل على الإرادة الشعبية التركية

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