Sudan Cracks Down on Rebels as Secession Nears

The New York Times reports:

The Sudanese Army and its allied militias have gone on an unsparing rampage to crush rebel fighters in the Nuba Mountains of central Sudan, bombing thatch-roofed villages, executing elders, burning churches and pitching another region of the country into crisis, according to United Nations officials and villagers who have escaped.

“The market was burning,” said Salah Kaka, a mother of four who trekked for days with thousands of others to a mushrooming refugee camp after her husband disappeared during an air raid. “I dug ditches in the ground and hid the children.”

Tens of thousands of rebel fighters have refused the government’s threat to disarm, digging into the craggy hillsides. They are demanding political reform and autonomy, a familiar refrain in Sudan’s marginalized hinterlands that has set off insurgencies in Darfur in the west, as well as eastern and southern Sudan.