Christmas In Darfur

Here is something else that is not getting enough attention. Darfur. This bit is from a post on the blog of some gentlemen that spent Christmas in Darfur: Gathering statistics about Darfur has been a very difficult problem, owing to poor record keeping, lack of civil society, and ongoing insecurity problems. To some extent, this vagueness has made it a bit more difficult to provide a meaningful basis for discussion of the effectiveness of the government of Sudan in their ethnic cleansing campaign in Darfur over the last four years. These numbers are most certainly approximate, and are intended to be illustrative... To date, the campaigns undertaken by the Sudanese government have accounted for about one in five of the world's "Internally Displaced Persons" - those who have been driven from their homes, most often due to conflict, but have not been able to escape to other countries. Of the roughly 5.5 million people driven from their homes in Sudan, a bit more than half are refugees directly associated with the ethnic cleansing campaign in Darfur. The approximately 3 million people who have had their homes destroyed or have been forced in to relocation camps due to ongoing violence compares with the entire population of Chicago at 2,842,518. The total number of people killed in the genocide thus far has been estimated at 400,000 to 450,000. However, these numbers date back to about April of 2006. As 10,000-15,000 people are killed each month, current totals may range from 480,000 to a worst-case scenario of 570,000. These numbers are roughly comparable to the population of New Orleans (454,863) or Washington DC (550,521).