Almost two million Sudanese people were driven from their homes in a single year by an Arab Muslim militia known as Janjaweed with the support of the Sudanese military:

Delegates said the Antonovs and helicopter gunships usually strafed and bombed villages to prepare for the Janjaweed assault. They said Janjaweed fighters arrived on horseback and camels to kill, loot, rape and burn.

The Janjaweed have been heavily armed and well-supplied, U.S. officials and congressional members said. They were provided with satellite phones to maintain constant communications with Sudanese military commanders.

This is making the news as if it were something new. Of course, to put things into proper context this is actually the second Sudanese genocide. The first was carried on against black non-Muslims (i.e., mainly Christians) in south Sudan — a 20-year effort that killed 2 million, displaced 4 and half million and enslaved tens of thousands:

Government forces, armed with sophisticated weapons and Islamist morale, waged an unrelenting jihad against the “atheist and infidel” southern rebels.

The violence in Sudan has gone on too long:

But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.

History is important, as we will see in a moment. For now, we (like the press) will concentrate on the current situation. You see, now that most of southern Sudan has been cleansed of Christian blacks, the government (ruled by the National Islamic Front and seated in the Arab-dominated northern Sudan) is waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing in an area of Sudan called Darfour to rid the country of black Muslims:

The most vicious ethnic cleansing you’ve never heard of is unfolding here in the southeastern fringes of the Sahara Desert. It’s a campaign of murder, rape and pillage by Sudan’s Arab rulers that has forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages.

Murder, rape, branding, pillage, enslavement — all skills honed by 20 years of practice against a poorly-arm upstart rebellious south. On the other hand, government forces are well equipped. For example, earlier this year they purchased a dozen MiG-29 Fulcrum jet fighters from Russia to supplement the 34 Chinese Shenyang F-7 super-sonic fighters they have purchased since 2000. We can always trust the Russians and the Chinese to capitalize on human suffering in pursuit of making a buck. How terribly progressive and capitalistic of them.

This is a nation in which an entire generation has grown up in fear. Imagine living in a time and place that something like this was the daily reality:

“A 43-year-old woman told members of Fakhouri’s team that she was one of many women who had been raped when she went out of Masteri for food and firewood.

“She said women are being raped every day, but they continue to go out because the men will be killed if they venture out.”

There are as many stories like this as there are people gathered together in that dreary place. Stories of children being carried off to be sold. Stories of children who fought their kidnappers, or so one would imagine for why else would their lifeless bodies by found discarded on the side of the road? Stories of a man who ventured out to gather a few sticks to build a hut but was caught and killed, leaving behind a family doomed to starvation.

The U.N. is concerned. Last Friday a Unitied Nations spokeman said that up to 30,000 refugees could flood a single spot on the Chad-Sudan border “if no credible measures are taken to make them feel secure inside.” This would overwhelm the ability of aid organizations to care for the displaced persons and create a humanitarian crisis of mammoth proportions.

However, it seems that the looming crisis feared by UN officials may not happen after all as aid pours in and malnutrition is dropping to former levels. Never mind that 1.25 million people have been driven from their homes and (it is now believed) another 300,000 are dead — the UN breathes a sigh of relief because the malnutrition isn’t as bad.

Only a week ago it was reported that villages in Darfour were being strafed by aircraft. Yet the U.N. crows about this sign of progress:

The Sudanese government signed an agreement with the U.N. migration agency Saturday to ensure that more than one million people displaced by violence in the western region of Darfur can voluntarily return home — but cannot be forced to do so.

Remember the history? Remember the fear these people live under?

It will be shocking if many refugees decide to return, as most believe know that Sudan President Umar Bashir wants the country to be “a purely Arab nation.”

And people complain about racism in America. If Dr. King were alive and in the Sudan his speech would be, “I have a dream where a woman can go to the well to get water without being raped because she is black; where a child can go outside without being kidnapped and sold into slavery to support a vile war; where a Muslim man is not murdered because he is not an Arab Muslim.”

Is it any wonder that the Sudanese government has rejected the idea of African peacekeepers on thier soil? Why would they want any prying eyes as the cleansing continues?