By Eric Reeves
December 2, 2013 (SSNA) — Although we know a great deal about the number and effect of thousands of Antonov attacks on civilian targets over the past fifteen years, little has been written about how the international community sustains this brutal aerial campaign. The countless violations of the UN arms embargo on Darfur (2005), for example, as well as the Khartoum regime’s open flouting of UN Security Council demands that it stop all offensive military flights over Darfur (2005), have been essentially ignored in recent years. This is despite previous work by the UN Panel of Experts on Darfur, which regularly provided highly reliable and damning information about Khartoum’s violations. Precisely because of its revealing honesty—which predictably offended China and Russia, among others—the UN Panel has been eviscerated, replaced by the UN Secretariat with a collection of essentially political appointments that have done nothing equivalent to the serious and sustained work of previous Panels, including spending substantial time on the ground in Darfur.
We now have a superb overview of just how the international community enables Antonov attacks to continue, what assistance—material and maintenance—is provided by a wide range of countries, including European countries. Mike Lewis, a former member of an earlier UN Panel of Experts on Darfur, has provided an extraordinarily detailed and authoritative account of this assistance. It has no equivalent, either in its research or comprehensiveness:
"How to Stop the Antonovs" (December 1, 2013)
http://treehugginghoolah.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/how-to-stop-antonovs.html
Lewis leaves no hiding place for those countries and companies that profit from the massive and ongoing savagery of Antonov bombing attacks on civilians. Replete with photographs, multiple URL links, and revealing graphics, "How to Stop the Antonovs" is critical reading for anyone interested in what, over the years, has sustained what are in aggregate crimes against humanity.
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Eric Reeves, author of: "’They Bombed Everything that Moved’: Aerial military attacks on civilians and humanitarians in Sudan, 1999 – 2013" (www.SudanBombing.org)