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Curse of the Janjaweed

By thescian on September 22, 2007.

As soon as she saw the two darkly clad men riding towards her on camels, their heads and faces swathed in scarves, Nafisa Mohamed knew what she must do. "I told my son and my daughter to run as fast as they could." The men were the Janjaweed, nomadic Arab bandits who have been slaughtering Darfuri men and raping women, in a military offensive engineered by the Sudanese government. Jinn is Arabic for demon and jawad means horse. Darfuri people will tell you that the Janjaweed are indeed devils on horseback. Nafisa had been living for a year in Kalma camp, which houses about 120,000 Darfuri people who have had their homes destroyed by the Janjaweed. On this day she walked several miles away from the camp with two of her children to collect firewood. When the men approached, she feared they would try to kill her 13-year-old son and rape her 11-year-old daughter, but thought that if she surrendered herself and submitted they wouldn't bother chasing her children. She knew they might kill her. Certainly they'd rape her.

Article in Times Online [via reddit]

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The article left me numb. How can a human being be so cruel,selfish? Time and again man has proved that the basal instincts overtake sensibilities when given an opportunity.
It's a pity that leaders of the world turn a blind eye - why? in the name of diplomacy? I can never understand politics.