Please find below, the item from The Independent (London) about the importation of Arabs to occupy the land from which the Afro-Dafurians were expelled by the Sudan govt forces and the Janjaweed.

Arabs pile into Darfur to take land 'cleansed' by janjaweed
By Steve Bloomfield, Africa Correspondent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article2768232.ece

Published: 14 July 2007

Arabs from Chad and Niger are crossing into Darfur in "unprecedented" numbers, prompting claims that the Sudanese government is trying systematically to repopulate the war- ravaged region.

An internal UN report, obtained by The Independent, shows that up to 30,000 Arabs have crossed the border in the past two months. Most arrived with all their belongings and large flocks. They were greeted by Sudanese Arabs who took them to empty villages cleared by government and janjaweed forces.

One UN official said the process "appeared to have been well planned". The official continued: "This movement is very large. We have not seen such numbers come into west Darfur before."

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, sent a team to the border with Chad at the end of May to interview the new arrivals. Fighting in eastern Chad has been steadily increasing and it was thought that many could be refugees. But only a very small number have required support from UNHCR.

"Most have been relocated by Sudanese Arabs to former villages of IDPs (internally displaced people) and more or less invited to stay there," said the UN official.

The arrivals have been issued with official Sudanese identity cards and awarded citizenship, and analysts say that by encouraging Arabs from Chad, Niger and other parts of Sudan to move to Darfur the Sudanese government is making it "virtually impossible" for displaced people to return home.

James Smith, chief executive of the Aegis Trust, said the revelations proved that the Sudanese government was "cynically trying to change the demographics of the whole region", adding: "If the ethnic cleansing has been consolidated because the land has been repopulated it will become irreversible. The peace process will fall to pieces."

Repopulation has also been happening in south Darfur where Arabs from elsewhere in Sudan have been allowed to move into villages that were once home to local tribes. Aid agency workers said the Arabs were presented as "returning IDPs".

Before the conflict started in 2003, Darfur was home to seven million people, mainly from three African tribes, Fur, Marsalit and Zargahwa. Darfur literally translates as "Land of the Fur". But some 2.5 million have now been forced to flee their homes after attacks by Sudanese troops and planes, and Arab militia on horseback known as janjaweed.

Most are now in camps around Darfur's main towns, relying on handouts from international aid agencies. About 250,000 have become refugees in Chad. A further 1.5 million have been affected by the conflict, meaning at least four million people are now reliant on the 80 or so international aid agencies in the region. More than 200,000 people are believed to have been killed so far during the four-and-a-half-year conflict.

And if Khartoum is moving Arabs from abroad to replace them, diplomats fear that Darfur rebels may try to remove them forcibly. "It could be quite explosive," said one western diplomat. "It is a very serious situation."

Nomadic Arab tribes have been crossing the border between Chad and Sudan for centuries, long before lines were drawn on a map. It is normal for tribes to follow the rains from west to east and back again, searching for fertile grazing land for their cattle. Straight lines carve out the northern borders of the five countries which spread across the Sahel, taking no notice of traditional tribal links and nomadic routes.

In Mauritania and Sudan, both countries long ruled by Arabs, black African tribes have suffered most. In Mali, Niger and Chad, the Arab and Tuareg nomads have been suppressed.

Towards the end of last year, Niger announced that it planned forcibly to remove more than 150,000 Arab nomads into Chad. Many of the Arabs, known as Mahamid, moved from Chad in the 1970s after a serious drought. Although the government later rescinded the order, it is thought that many decided to return to Chad voluntarily.

Apart from the 30,000 Arabs from Chad and Niger cited in the UNHCR report there have been consistent rumours that a further 45,000 Arabs from Niger have also crossed over. For most nomads citizenship means very little; the lines that separate the countries of the Sahel have not created a sense of nationality. But for the Khartoum regime it could be pivotal. Elections are to be held in two years, the first since President Omar al-Bashir seized power in a coup in 1989.

Although opinion polling is not very advanced, it is thought that no party is likely to win an overall majority. By providing citizenship for the new arrivals, one Khartoum-based diplomat said, President Bashir could be hoping to bolster his election chances.

For the Arabs who have crossed into Darfur there are both push and pull factors. Drought in parts of northern Africa has forced nomads to look further afield for fertile land. Although the spread of desert is rapidly reducing the amount of land available for farmers and nomads in Darfur, much of the area cleared by the janjaweed and government forces is fertile.

An ethnic cleansing and colonisation strategy that stretches back through history

* EAST TIMOR: The poorest country in Asia, much of East Timor's instability stems from the country's repeated colonisation. Invaded and occupied by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, hundreds of thousands of Javanese migrants flooded the former Portuguese colony from nearby islands as part of a government-sponsored programme. This led to decades of violent clashes between the indigenous Timorese population, which is 90 per cent Roman Catholic, and the Muslim Javanese migrants. There has been little improvement following the Indonesian withdrawal and East Timor's subsequent independence; in 2006 150,000 East Timor residents were displaced due to conflicts.

* SOVIET UNION: Russia deliberately exported ethnic Russians to restive republics during Soviet times.

Thirty per cent of the population of the Baltic state of Estonia was implanted during the Soviet regime. In 1949, following the annexation of the Baltic states, Stalin, right, deported 42,000 Latvians to Siberia. As a result, the proportion of ethnic Russians there increased from 8.8 per cent in 1935 to 34 per cent by 1989. Stalin's ethnic cleansing - involving 3 million people between 1941 and 1949 - included the deportation of 200,000 Crimean Tatars to central Asia.

* KOSOVO: Currently administered by the UN, this disputed land-locked province in southern Serbia endured conflicts throughout the 1990s, fuelled by ethnic divisions and repression. With Serbian and ethnic Albanian inhabitants vying for supremacy, these struggles came to a head in the mid-1990s, when Serbian forces began a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Kosovo's mainly Muslim Albanians. Thousands of people died and hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to neighbouring states. Reconciliation between Kosovo's 1.5 million ethnic Albanians and its 100,000 Serbs remains elusive, pending approval of an internationally backed draft plan for virtual independence.

Robot  # 1 | 30.07.2007 12:04

...Read the full article.

Anon  # 2 | 30.07.2007 18:50

Wonderful News Chinweizu. :mad: :mad: :mad: You will hardly find our honorable arabic scholar Khahil trying to explain this dastardly act, like he keeps doing with other related subjects all over the square. Afterall he is proud to tells us that he is a proud descendant of Arab warlords and a long line of Arab princes and Queens. And yet there are some on this square still hallucinating about USofAfrica with the Arabs? Obviously for the black man it is not yet Uhuru!

Jah Guda  # 3 | 31.07.2007 04:51

We are very good at talking but useless when it comes to confronting our problems head-on. Most if not all of the countries mentioned above, Kosovo, East Timor and others, stood up and fought back, they did what brave men and women would do if they found themselves in a similar situation, defend their land and people. Look how the Arabs have held their ground in the Middle East, fighting the White invaders and their 1,000lb bombs. If you were in a similar situation you most probably hide behind the curtains and wet your pants everytime you hear an American accent. For those of you who claim to be angry and mad about the situation in Sudan, rather than mouth it off day in, day out, why don't you go there and defend your black African brothers and sisters. Cowards, sitting comfortably in a White mans country giving it the big'n.

Khalil  # 4 | 31.07.2007 10:51

=Anon;196091>Wonderful News Chinweizu. :mad: :mad: :mad: You will hardly find our honorable arabic scholar Khahil trying to explain this dastardly act, like he keeps doing with other related subjects all over the square. Afterall he is proud to tells us that he is a proud descendant of Arab warlords and a long line of Arab princes and Queens. And yet there are some on this square still hallucinating about USofAfrica with the Arabs? Obviously for the black man it is not yet Uhuru! Anon, You've already formed an opinion on me just for the simple reason that I have an Arab blood, what will it matter then I respond? But has it ever dawned on you that the writer of the article is another whiteman with white blood, a colonialist, at best, like me? Why then should you assume he is saying the truth enough for you to call my attention, in your preemptive mode, that I, cannot be telling the truth at the same time? If for my Arabness I cannot be good, why can the reporter be good for his whiteness? Or is it only Igbo that are good and true Africans for their Jewishness? Khalilurrahman

Anon  # 5 | 31.07.2007 14:45

=Khalil;196241>Anon, You've already formed an opinion on me just for the simple reason that I have an Arab blood, what will it matter then I respond? But has it ever dawned on you that the writer of the article is another whiteman with white blood, a colonialist, at best, like me? Why then should you assume he is saying the truth enough for you to call my attention, in your preemptive mode, that I, cannot be telling the truth at the same time? If for my Arabness I cannot be good, why can the reporter be good for his whiteness? Or is it only Igbo that are good and true Africans for their Jewishness? Khalilurrahman Khalil, thanks for your comments. You are right that this could have been written by a white man with a specific agenda. However what I have failed to see from you and a number of other Arabic islamist scholars is an attempt to address the Dafur situation at all. Somehow I wonder if it's easier for you folks to pretend that Dafur is not happening and does not exist. Listen it's ok for you propagate arabanism all over the square from mainly Arab scholars. We have numerous western atheists who write on western theologies and ideologies all the time and it's not everything they write that one can consider fair and objective, but at least they try and with an unbiased mind one can get to read and see what sense there is to their arguments. I am a vociferous critic of western imperialism under any form, despite my tepid Christian faith as are many people that I come across. Conversely what I fail to see is any attempt by Muslims of any hue and color attempting to check the rise of arabianism in any part of the world, most especially in Africa. As for the Igbos and their alleged Jewish ancestry, I personally consider it nothing more than hubris so that cheap shot has little to do with how I view the Igbo equation and ancestry. Just my opinion really.

DeepThought  # 6 | 31.07.2007 20:38

Khali, Is ALL what is written about Darfur made up? For those of you who claim to be angry and mad about the situation in Sudan, rather than mouth it off day in, day out, why don't you go there and defend your black African brothers and sisters. Cowards, sitting comfortably in a White mans country giving it the big'n There is no quick or easy answer to this. Before you call people cowards, perhaps you need to consider that perhaps this is not happening for the same reasons Nigerians we are not storming the gates of ASO rock. I don't deny cowardice is a factor but you have to understand that even cowards fight. The reality is that probably 99.9 of people have neither the ways or means to be effective in delivering violence.

Khalil  # 7 | 01.08.2007 06:38

DeepThought, It is not everything written about Dafur can be said to be made up, a lot is correct! Anon, It is possible you did not read this article,http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/board/main-square/37211-nigerias-problem-real-problems.html , by my humble self, about ethnicity in politics and its origin in Nigeria and Africa. In it I tried to provide a solution to the whole problem in my own way. Here is the problem statement of the article and I pray you will find time and read it carefully, give me your critique and then desist from further attributing silence to me in these issues for I speak only for myself. Introduction The subject of identity and insistence on its pursuit, in racio-ethno-geographical terms, is one thing that tells more about the seemingly destructive future of Africa in particular and the modern world in general in spite of the many claims of globalisation. In what follows, I wish to understand identity as a means of evaluating, assessing and placing humankind in the context it was used before the emergence of the concept of nation-state as an ethno-racial, politico-social entity in the 18th century, and the way it is being used today after the consolidation of that conception as the most viable, if not only medium of shaping the thinking processes of all members of political communities in settling the inevitable question of who earns what in the pursuits of the benefits of human intercourse. I will try to place Nigeria in this context to see whether its survival as a multiethnic nation along with other African countries of multiple ethnic groupings is truly uncertain as predicted by many scholars on Africa. According to these scholars the future of African countries is foreseen only in the light of anarchy: a chronic civil war. Or the breaking up of the present political constituents into smaller nations because of, among other things, the looming consciousness and affinity people increasingly have for tribe and geography as sole means of identifying who is who in the string of political equations. Khalilurrahman

Anon  # 8 | 01.08.2007 08:11

=Khalil;196471>DeepThought, It is not everything written about Dafur can be said to be made up, a lot is correct! Anon, It is possible you did not read this article,http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/board/main-square/37211-nigerias-problem-real-problems.html , by my humble self, about ethnicity in politics and its origin in Nigeria and Africa. In it I tried to provide a solution to the whole problem in my own way. Here is the problem statement of the article and I pray you will find time and read it carefully, give me your critique and then desist from further attributing silence to me in these issues for I speak only for myself. Khalilurrahman I actually missed this article and will read it Khalil, but when you so studiously defend others or what I consider arabianism, then you happen to speak for others as well, or don't you? But I'll read and let my opinions be known.

Jah Guda  # 9 | 01.08.2007 08:21

=Anon;196485>I actually missed this article and will read it Khalil, but when you so studiously defend others or what I consider arabianism, then you happen to speak for others as well, or don't you? But I'll read and let my opinions be known. It gets right up your nose when someone speaks on behalf of OTHERS, Why? So the weak must die as far as your thinking process goes. Dudes, you sound like one of those people whose KNOWLEDGE is limited to Amala, Beer and Boobs. :rolleyes: