by - In a garish example of anti-democratic, anti-West, collective state hypocrisy, leaders from the BRICS bloc — representing Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — meeting in South Africa over three days last week invited four Muslim states and two others to join the bloc, while keeping total silence over the racist and Islamist massacre by heavily armed Arab militias of black African civilians being carried out in West Darfur in Sudan over the preceding weeks.
- “[A]trocities pile up in Darfur after 100 days of Sudan fighting”, in which “Arab militias are accused of killing lawyers, human rights monitors, doctors and non-Arab tribal leaders”. — Al Jazeera, July 24, 2023.
- ” [The city of Al-Geneina in West Darfur] has been ethnically cleansed.” — Humanitarian worker, Sky News, broadcasting scenes of thousands of desperate Sudanese refugees displaced in neighbouring Chad, August 17, 2023.
- The Africa Defense Forum disclosed on May 16 that Russia’s Wagner group was supervising gold-mining in Darfur, and smuggling nearly $2 billion in gold out of the country.
- Yet the “great and the good” — China’s President Xi Jinping, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, with Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing the congregation by video to endorse Russia’s war in Ukraine — made no mention of this genocidal massacre.
- Instead, the BRICS leaders invited states with the world’s longest history of enslaving black Africans to join them.
- China’s Xinhua news agency reported how Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, who attended the BRICS conference, hailed it as a “commendable step that will facilitate worldwide development while upholding principles of justice.”
- Justice? Raisi was deputy prosecutor general in a four-member committee codenamed the “death commission” in Iran in 1988, which was responsible for the executions of thousands of political prisoners who were loyal to a banned opposition movement, “on orders issued by Raisi and his three colleagues.”
- Worse, although slavery continued legally in Iran until 1929, “It never went away”. — iranwire.com, April 30, 2020.
- The article showed a series of photos of black African slaves in Iran, such as this one from the 1880s. — Denise Hassanzade Ajiri, “The face of African slavery in Qajar Iran – in pictures,” The Guardian, January 14, 2016.
- The issue of the enslavement and oppression of black Africans — continuing to this day in Darfur and elsewhere — is an issue suppressed by BRICS.