Shades of Srebrenica

For many of us, the arrest of Ratko Mladic brought back memories of the Balkans Wars in the 1990s. That was a ghastly episode in European history, one in which neighbour fought neighbour and community fought community, while Western governments for the most part just wrung their hands or shrugged their shoulders.

Few European leaders emerged with any credit from the conflict, but a nadir was reached in Srebrenica, where Dutch UN peacekeepers stood idly by as Mladic’s men committed one of the worst massacres in post-1945 Europe. The Dutch people shamed their government into resignation over that disgrace, and, not for the first time, the cry went up of ‘never again’.

Yet we are now seeing the same thing happening again. In Sudan, in the region of the Nuba Mountains where my charity Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust works, the Islamist regime based in Khartoum is engaged in full scale ethnic cleansing of the black African population. As I write this column, thousands are gathered outside the United Nations compound in the regional capital, without food, water or hope. Under the eyes of UN ‘peacekeepers’, Sudanese soldiers are reported to be going door-to-door killing anyone who looks ‘too black’. Over 100,000 people have been expelled from their homes – and they are arguably the lucky ones.

Above: Civilians come under air attack under the noses of the UN

With a few honourable exceptions, the media, sated with conflict in Libya and Syria, has little time or space for yet another African conflict. And thanks to ill-informed defence cuts, it’s arguable that there’s little enough we can do anyway.

But that is no excuse for the fact that the British government – one of the three guarantors of the peace deal that was supposed to end over 50 years of fighting in Sudan – continues to wine and dine Khartoum’s Foreign Minister.

After the Rwanda genocide, we again said ‘never again’. Then, we possibly had the excuse of “we didn’t know.”

We have no such excuse this time.