“Bottom line — Bashir is using food as a weapon. We are quickly reaching a time when mere statements will prove wholly insufficient. If Khartoum persists in barring international access to these regions, there will be devastating consequences,” said Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia.
Representative Frank Wolf
A US congressman pleaded Monday for action to bring food to thousands in Sudan’s South Kordofan state, accusing the Khartoum government of new “ethnic cleansing” after a visit to the region.
Representative Frank Wolf said he went last week to the Yida refugee camp across the border in newly independent South Sudan and heard accounts of aerial attacks, arbitrary shootings and severe lack of food in South Kordofan.
Wolf showed to a Washington news conference videotaped interviews he conducted with women at the camp who said that Sudan’s mostly Arab forces targeted them for rape and other abuses because they were black and Christian.
“Clearly, ethnic cleansing is familiar territory for Khartoum,” said Wolf, a longtime critic of President Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted for alleged war crimes in the separate conflict in Darfur.
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