Starving people eating roots and tree bark in Sudan's forgotten warzones

(Vatican Radio) Thousands of starving civilians are reduced to eating roots and the bark of trees in Sudan’s forgotten war zones in the Blue Nile and the Nuba Mountains. International humanitarian relief access has been blocked since armed conflict erupted there between the Sudanese government and opposition groups in 2011. Human rights activists say the Khartoum government is terrorizing the civilian population in the two areas with systematic bombing in an ethnic cleansing policy that could be close to genocide. One human rights activist who has just returned from a visit to the two areas is Baroness Cox from Britain’s House of Lords. She spoke to Vatican Radio’s Susy Hodges about what she saw.
Listen to the extended interview with Baroness Cox:

Baroness Cox describes the situation facing civilians in these two areas as "appalling" with "constant aerial combardments" by the Khartoum government's forces, with sometimes as much as "60 bombs a day" being dropped. The result of this scorched earth policy, she says, is starvation with the local population forced to eat "the bark of trees or roots that they scavenge for." In her view, the situation in the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains is "probably the worst humantarian crisis in the world today."

Baroness Cox goes on to urge the rest of the world and especially faith groups to sit up and take notice and speak out more forcefully: "The international community and the Churches need to speak up much more strongly because .... what is happening is ethnic cleansing and maybe could come within the realm of genocide," she says.

The Baroness asks: "Can we as Christians really shout out to our governments to take action"... because, she adds, "if they don't take action they are implicitly being complicit."