SUDAN: The death toll in Darfur could already exceed the numbers killed by the recent tsunami in southeast Asia, according to the Irish documentary film-maker Ronan Tynan.
Speaking at a seminar organised by the Development Studies Centre in UCD, Tynan said the Sudanese regime had covered up the scale of the genocide.
He also claimed that a reasonable estimate of the numbers killed could be over 300,000, using available evidence as a basis for extrapolation.
The recent decision of the Sudanese government to refuse visas to a World Health Organisation team seeking to conduct a study on mortality in Darfur is "yet another pathetic attempt by the Sudanese regime to conceal the horrific scale of the death toll", Tynan said.
"Darfur is a human rights disaster of almost biblical proportions when you have a situation where 10-year-old girls are gang-raped as part of a campaign against women which has no parallel in modern times in terms of scale," Tynan added.
"While the killing continues, almost every village has been burned or bombed at this stage. Those who were not killed or raped during the attacks are forced to remain in camps.
"The regime has ethnically cleansed large swathes of the country and another planting season is about to be missed.
"This poses the question: will engineered famine be the final chapter in the Darfur genocide? A 'final solution' is in production in which the instruments of mass killing will be starvation and disease - if we allow that to happen," he added.