Photo Credit : Painting by Armenian Artist Meruzhan Khachatryan titled ‘It Is Devoted To Sacred Memory The Triptych Part 1’
Eric Reeves is a professor of English at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is also the most knowledgeable authority on the genocide in Sudan, having carefully studied it and written about it in great detail over thirteen years. Such expertise has led him to testify before congress on genocide and in the process he has become a recognized champion for the suffering people of Darfur and the Nuba Mountains, both those still in Sudan, or at large as refugees in the Sudanese expat communities. And, for all of this, quite naturally he is a twice-told victim of targeted harassment by the genocidal dictatorship of Sudan, in Khartoum.
The first attack took place in the early nineties and was traced back to Tehran, a long-term ally of Khartoum. The damage to Reeves’ website became an actual threat to the server, and all the URL’s based on the server. This forced Dr. Reeves to spend time and money to create a new domain name and a brand new website with all the tedious business of moving a back-log of articles and materials from the old site to the new one. Things heated up again in February when friends of Eric Reeves on FB, and connected to his new site experienced a vicious intrusion of malware including grossly photo-shopped pornography featuring Reeves.
Effectively, this forced Reeves to delete his FB account, the ‘soft underbelly’ of his security. It also compelled him to clean up the mess on his old computer. But what makes the situation worse is the failure of FB to provide Reeves with any serious solutions to the problem, in spite of Reeve’s repeated attempts to communicate with FB about the issue. Dr. Reeves contacted Homeland Security and received from them no response whatsoever.
Khartoum has a powerful intelligence service with a professional, international presence, even in Western Europe. It also has a Tehran-backed and educated cyber-terrorism unit based out of the weirdly named University of the Future, in Khartoum. Firm believers (we assume) in the evil adage “No good deed deserves to go unpunished” Khartoum not only punished Eric Reeves, but the many Sudanese nationals who depend on his championship of their causes, and the many activists who rely on him for careful studies of Khartoum’s on-going crimes against humanity.
Eric Reeves is not the first American citizen to be targeted by the terrorist-supporting government of Sudan. The case of Ryan Boyette, the aid-worker from Florida had received wider-play in the US and Western media. Boyette had come to Sudan with Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian aid agency, and while there, fell in love with a local woman, Jazira, a health-care worker, and married her. The war against the people in the Nuba Mountains heated up in 2011 and Boyette was ordered out by Samaritan’s Purse but now he had new family in the Mountains, and so he chose to stay and do whatever he could do the help his people.
Boyette put together Nuba Reports, a news organization composed of Nuba Mountain professionals and volunteers: hell-runners who ran the gauntlet of the war to bring stories about what was happening, originally in the Nuba Mountains, but with time, also the larger region of South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and the Darfur. The short story is, of course, Khartoum continued its vicious bombing run against the Nuba Mountain peoples but now Ryan Boyette and his brave gang of newsters were on the target list. In part, Boyette owes his continued existence to the shoddiness of Khartoum’s airforce – old Antonov cargo planes from Russia, and home-made bombs that were poorly targeted.
And this brings us directly to the US surgeon, Tom Catena, whose struggles to repair the damage and the traumas inflicted by bombings and other injuries by the government in Khartoum. Dr. Catena runs the Mother of Mercy Hospital in the Nuba Mountains where he is quite literally the only surgeon around for a population of over a million. His hospital has been deliberately bombed.
Khartoum wishes to discourage people from relying on the hospital and more importantly, wants to drive Catena out of Sudan, by choice or by a body bag. Raised by Muslim parents, Tom Catena converted to Christianity while still a child and did a stint in the United States Navy where he was trained as a surgeon. When he left the Navy, he wanted to give back for the career and education he received and this put him on the hard road to the Nuba Mountains.
It’s estimated he performs one thousand surgeries a year in a completely hostile environment: underfunded, under facilitated, the Mother of Mercy Hospital is the one thing that stands in the way of an entire people losing all sophisticated medical help at all.
Maybe it is a lie to say “no good deed deserves to go unpunished”, but where is the American government when American citizens are punished for doing good deeds in the middle of genocide – a genocide created by a government that has supported terrorism for over 25 years -?
Wag 