When President George Bush promised a "new world order" at the end of the Cold War, he implied that human rights abuses in any country would concern the entire global community. President Clinton made the point more explicitly when he opened Washington's Holocaust Museum in 1993. Acknowledging that America and the world acted too late against Hitler's death machine, Clinton pledged that "all of us will get it right" the next time.

This globalist rhetoric has been put to shame by the world's failure to confront the systemic anti-civilian violence that for years has engulfed Sudan. U.S. leaders have essentially ignored the Islamic fundamentalist government's systematic campaign to starve, murder, enslave, and sexually exploit people--especially children and women--who are darker-skinned, non-Arab, or adhere to a religion other than Islam. Such policies would be horrifying anywhere, but are especially so in a country as ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse as Sudan.

Sudan has a complex history of conflict and coexistence between its light-skinned, mostly Muslim Arabs in the north and darker-skinned Africans from the south, who follow Islam, Christianity, and traditional religions. But, as Amnesty International stresses in The Tears of Orphans: No Future Without Human Rights (January 1995), the 1989 takeover by an Islamic fundamentalist military clique ushered in "a new era of human rights violations characterized by a range and scale of abuse unprecedented in Sudan's history." Jihad, or holy war against infidels, served as a rationale for everything from summarily executing anyone suspected of opposing the new regime to abducting women and children and selling them into slavery.

In Children of Sudan: Slaves, Street Children, and Child Soldiers (September 1995), Human Rights Watch/Africa describes how Sudan's government uses troops and allied tribal militias against both rebel soldiers and civilian populations in the largely non-Muslim south. Thousands of children and women have been captured, forcibly transported hundreds of miles away from their homes, and turned into unpaid household slaves. Viewed as war booty or chattel, many of these slaves are branded and, as Tim Sandler details in the Boston Phoenix (June 30, 1994), are later bought and sold in "cattle markets" for money or livestock. Sexual abuse is common, since sexuality becomes part of the "property right deriving from conquest."