Workers' Liberty

Gillian Gibbons, the teacher who was locked up by the Sudanese authorities for allowing her class to call a teddy bear Muhammad, said of her experience: “The Sudanese people I found to be extremely kind and generous and until this happened I only had a good experience.”

By Rosalind Robson

More than four years since the war in Darfur began and not much less time since a massive international campaign called for them, the UN has agreed to send “peacekeeping” troops to Sudan. The deployment coincides with an agreement between all but one of Darfur’s opposition groups, to jointly seek peace talks with the Sudanese government.

By Amina Saddiq

At the end of March, the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns reported that, across the country, the Home Office had accelerated its programme of rounding up and deporting Sudanese asylum-seekers, including people from war-ravaged and ethnically-cleansed Darfur.

By Sofie Buckland, NUS national executive

One of the Darfuris faced with deportation is Sadiq Abakar, who has spent over seven years in Britain in Britain awaiting asylum.

The meeting last night was useful, though it had to be cut short because of a misunderstanding about the booking times. I think it's important that we do something on this, limited as it may be.

A public meeting, co-sponsors: London Workers' Liberty and SOAS Friends of Africa

7.30pm, Thursday 8 February
School of Oriental and African Studies Vernon Square campus, near Kings Cross and Angel tubes
(for a map see here.)

All welcome

Speakers include:

By Cathy Nugent

THE Islamist military dictatorship in Sudan has launched the second stage of the civil war in Darfur. They want to put down the groups which refused to sign a ceasefire and political agreement in May of this year. If they do not stop this assault, thousands of civilians will be persecuted and killed. In mid-September the UN reported government arial bombardments in the north of the region. They expect thousands of people to be displaced. Those people fear the campaign of terror which has always followed such bombardments, when government-backed militia has gone into villages to raze them to the ground and sexually assault the women there.

Fighting is intensifying in Darfur, the western province of Sudan. The conflict began in 2003. Rebel groups demanding more autonomy for the area began attacking government targets. And the the Islamist-military government launched a brutal military campaign flanked by pro-government militias, the janjaweed.

By Rosalind Robson

At the end of last month the UN passed a resolution demanding that the Sudanese government disarm a militia behind a brutal ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of western Sudan.

By Cathy Nugent

Since February 2003 a brutal ethnic cleansing has taken place against some of the peoples of Darfur in western Sudan. It has been perpetrated by the military-Islamist government and the ferocious militia which it supports.