Sudan's topics - tribe.net

Darfur Fundraiser

Enzie — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 04:44:13 GMT

In 2007 I painted a little Sudanese girl standing at a feeding center in Darfur. This painting is now for auction until October 10th on Ebay. 100% of all proceeds go to the United Nations UNHCR to aid the people of Darfur. So far the auction bid is at $150, but that is too little to make a difference in the lives of people who could use out help.

Will you please help me spread the word about the auction by either adding the Ebay widget or image of the painting with link to http://www.EnzieShahmiri.com . You could even hit STUMBLE IT on my http://world-market-portraits.blogspot.com

I really need your raise awreness about this fundraiser and make it a success. In retunr for your help I will add you to the Participants list on my blog and do a write up about you and your site.

Thanks!

Enzie

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Darfur on London's Trafalgar Square

Sanaag — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:35:00 GMT

Thought this is relevant:

World Refugee Day: UNHCR brings the Darfur experience to London's Trafalgar Square

LONDON, United Kingdom, June 17 (UNHCR) – Thousands of Londoners, schoolchildren and foreign tourists got a taste of life in Sudan's troubled Darfur region on Tuesday after UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres kicked off World Refugee Day celebrations early with a visit to Trafalgar Square.

After touring a mock refugee camp, Guterres announced the results of the annual Global Trends report, which showed that the number of refugees under UNHCR's responsibility had risen in 2007 for the second year in a row to 11.4 million, while the overall number of people of concern to the agency stood at 31.7 million. He said the rise in refugee numbers was a concern.

The UN refugee agency had turned Trafalgar Square into a mock refugee camp for a day, setting up four lightweight family tents, interactive games, a torched village hut and exhibits of relief items, including blankets, kitchen sets, plastic sheeting, soap, buckets and clean, safe and environmentally friendly stoves as well as UNHCR vehicles with the agency's distinctive logo.

The exhibit, dubbed "Experience Darfur," opened early morning and soon attracted big crowds. Some 800 people signed up in the morning to receive more information about the hundreds of thousands of uprooted Sudanese people in Darfur and in camps run by the UN refugee agency in neighbouring Chad.

"The Trafalgar Square experience and exhibition has attracted a lot of attention and many people have been very positive about learning more about Darfur and the work of UNHCR," said Claudia Gisiger-Gonzalez, who is in charge of special events for the agency.

The exhibition illustrates some of the protection challenges UNHCR faces on a daily basis in delivering aid to some of the world's most vulnerable people. Each of the four tents focuses on a particular aspect of UNHCR's work – shelter; food; education; and rebuilding. Volunteers and UNHCR interns handed out literature and answered questions about humanitarian relief work and Darfur.

A group of 20 female Sudanese refugees sang and danced, while many people imitated the protecting hands of UNHCR's logo, which has become a potent symbol. The exhibit also featured 4X4 vehicles with screens showing videos of UNHCR operations. The event is being held to mark World Refugee Day, which actually falls on Friday.

"I took the day off to be here," said Mariann Wenckheim, an Austrian designer who lives in London. Another visitor, IT consultant Arthur Ochoa, said that he sometimes thought people in the industrialized world were becoming immune to the tragedies and disasters affecting millions, including refugees.

"We forget and take for granted the work of organizations, like UNHCR, bringing relief to the most affected regions of the world," he said, adding: "Keep up the good work."

Other visitors included British celebrities such as actress Sophie Okonedo, who won an Oscar nomination in 2005 for her role in "Hotel Rwanda," which depicts the genocide of the 1990s in that small landlocked African country which led to hundreds of thousands people fleeing their homes and creating a refugee problem in the Great Lakes region that endures to this day.

The conflict in Darfur is another pressing humanitarian crisis. Since the outbreak of violence in 2003, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and more than 2.5 million have been left internally displaced, while some 250,000 refugees from Darfur live in 12 UNHCR-run camps in eastern Chad.

The UN refugee agency has had a presence in Darfur since 2004, coordinating the humanitarian protection effort in West Darfur and maintaining a regular presence in the many camps and settlements of internally displaced Darfurians.

Meanwhile, High Commissioner Guterres said the number of refugees under UNHCR's care had risen from 9.9 to 11.4 million by the end of last year, while the number of people left internally displaced by conflict increased from 24.4 million to 26 million. UNHCR currently provides protection or assistance directly or indirectly to 13.7 million of them – up from 12.8 million in 2006.

The total number of people under UNHCR's care in 2007, including refugees, internally displaced people, stateless people and others, stood at 31.7 million people at the end of 2007. This excluded 4.6 million Palestinian refugees helped by another UN agency.

Guterres, who spoke about migration and the challenges presented by war, persecution and climate change during an address on Monday night at the Royal Geographical Society in London, will spend World Refugee Day itself in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

The Trafalgar Square event was supported by the UK government's Department for International Development, Toyota Gibraltar Stockholding Ltd., and the European Commissioner Representation to the UK. The tents were flown to London for free by UPS.

Sorce: http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/4857e8872.html

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Frontline on Darfur...

Frozenstars — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:24:07 GMT

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darfur/?campaign=pbshomefeatures_1_frontlinebronourwatch_2008-06-09

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

What is the What

missadventure — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:08:19 GMT

I just read it, it was an amazing story.

Have any of you read it? What did you think?

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Need Reference Photos for Darfur Painting Fundraiser

Enzie — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 02:23:42 GMT

I am going to paint an oil painting for a UN Darfur fundraiser (end of October) and I am in dire need of reference photos. I paint portraits of people and need something that is not copyright protected. Please if you can help to find some images for this good cause, Email them to me at artenzie@cox.net

Thanks!

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

AUG 18: Art4Africa: Benefit Soiree w- special guest Dr. Suad from Sudan

brooke118 — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 21:07:48 GMT

Dearest Friends & All Agents of Positive Social Change,
This Saturday, August 18th, a benefit soiree will be held at a stunning Beverly Hills estate exemplifying the collaborative, multi-disciplinary spirit of Empowerment Works with an art auction, dance and fire performances, live music, djs, dinner, and an open bar. Ecologist and community health expert, Dr. Suad Sulaiman, will be celebrating the end of her US tour and will share with us her solutions for a healthy, sustainable, peaceful Sudan.

Looking forward to seeing you this Saturday evening! Event webpage: http://empowermentworks.org/Art4Africa.html

Warmest regards,
Melanie St.James, MPA
Executive Director

RSVP NOW w/ Advance Purchase

Saturday, August 18th, 2007

Hosts James Otis, Jay Levin, Zan Naar, Holiday Hadley, Courtney White & Francesca Orsi invite you to

Join Empowerment Works in welcoming its program advisor from the Sudan,

Leading Ecologist and Community Health Expert, Dr. Suad Sulaiman

"Sudanese Environmental Conservation Society"

Join us in the Grand Finale Celebration of her US bridge-building tour as Suad shares her hope and visionary solutions for a Healthy, Sustainable and Peaceful Sudan.

~

6-7:45 - Art Exhibition Preview & VIP Q & A with Dr. Sulaiman

w/ Flutist Rebecca Kleinmann

8pm - The Summer Soiree Ignites

~

FINE ART EXHIBITION & SALE featuring LA’s finest local and international artists in all mediums.

DJs: WISEACRE (funky-in-the-middle/recline sounds) & ARGYLE (beat hackerz/topsoil)

STEAMING FIRE & OTHER EXUISITE PERFORMANCE DANCERS!

LIVE MUSIC: Funky Jazz, Indigenous Beats, Didgeridoos

CUISINE: Ayurvedic, Mediterranean & Vegetarian

OPEN BAR: Organic Margaritas, Wine & Beer,

VALET PARKING

~

1404 Dawnridge Dr. Beverly Hills, CA. 90210

*this is a private, invite only event.

GuestsLimited. Guaranteed entry only with advance purchase RSVP

$60 all inclusive entry RSVP by Aug. 14 / $100 @ Door w/ INVITE ONLY

**********************************************************************************

learn more about Dr. Suad and what this event will support: http://empowermentworks.org/Sudan.html

EW Sudan - Addressing Root-causes of Crisis

While international media highlights political issues surrounding the conflict in Darfur, the United Nations Environment Program reports that competition over scarce resources, including water, timber, oil, and land, could spark more fighting unless the issues are addressed, and that: "Ignoring these environmental issues will ensure that some political and social problems remain unsolvable and [are] even likely to worsen."

OPPORTUNITIES:

• While local communities face extreme poverty, the country is rich in natural resources which can be carefully used & conserved

• Drought & desertification effects of intensive agriculture can be reversed in preparation for climate change effects

• Displaced people are encouraged to return to their home lands when conditions are improved through livelihood creation and empowered through education

ACTION:

To address root-causes of these inextricably linked social and environmental issues, Empowerment Works is seeking funding and strategic partners to advance the following locally-run sustainable livelihood, eco-restoration and health strategies:

• Village Direct Carbon Offset Program (VDCOP) - Creation of Sudanese Carbon Credit fund for sustainable agro-forestry, agriculture, and ecological restoration

• 'El Rahad Appropriate Technology & Health Education Center' creating jobs & health by honoring traditional knowledge of medicinal plants

• Beyond Fair Trade™ micro-grants, capacity building & market access enabling women to support their families

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

http://tribes.tribe.net/savedarfur

greentrees — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 08:16:17 GMT

Save Darfur. I have started the above tribe. Please join to expand the awareness. Thank you and let's keep our voices alive and loud. Peace, JB

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

UNHCR's operations chief discusses new Darfur strategy...

Sanaag — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:09:45 GMT

I find this interview of interest. The OC says in her answer to question 4:
"For historical reasons, UNHCR has been quite modest in its programming in Darfur... But lately, we've been approached by the UN humanitarian coordinator [Manuel Aranda da Silva] ... to ask us to rethink. Do we just want to maintain the status quo. The status quo is not bad...."

UNHCR has been quite modest in Darfur?! The status quo is not bad?! What a strange strategy and troubling serenity in the face of such a disaster!! I am baffled!!! Can someone enlighten me?

------------------------

Q&A: UNHCR's operations chief discusses new Darfur strategy, IDPs and other projects

GENEVA, February 23 (UNHCR) – Assistant High Commissioner for Operations Judy Cheng-Hopkins spent more than two decades working in development assistance before moving to the humanitarian field because she wanted to see concrete results more quickly. She joined UNHCR almost exactly a year ago after six years with the World Food Programme and has visited operations in all five regions that the refugee agency operates in. She spoke to Web Editors Leo Dobbs and Haude Morel shortly after returning to Geneva from Sudan's Darfur region. Excerpts from the interview:

What are UNHCR's largest operations?

The biggest are the major hotspots of the world today – Iraq, Chad and southern Sudan. Then we have several protracted, long-standing operations that have been around for more than 10 years.... In some cases, they are slowly winding down, but it takes longer than you expect because return operations are not that easy. The Angola's, the Zambia's, the Liberia's are in that category of programmes winding down.

What are the major challenges you face in these types of operations?

In long-standing operations, the major challenge is usually to maintain donor interest as it tends to wane with time. So, [the major challenge is] trying to attract donor interest in order for us to complete the chapter. That one additional year for the return operation to take place is always an uphill struggle because donors rightfully want to see results and, of course, the better results you can produce the better the chances of them coming forward with the funding. Sometimes it's not so easy, for various reasons. There's still insecurity for people to return home and a lot of times to return home means that you will not have as good education and other basic services as you did in the camps.... So there is a reticence, a reluctance after having had these services for their families, for people to uproot themselves again and go back to nothing.

On the newer emergencies – Iraq and Darfur, for instance – security is a major challenge.... In Iraq, all we can rely on are national NGOs and these are nascent organisations. The problem there is how do you implement. We call it remote management, meaning that you don't sit in the country, you don't have your normal apparatus, your infrastructure to implement. You're sitting in another country and you do it through e-mails, phones, with national staff here and there, an NGO here and there, other partners here and there. That is a problem and we are going around in circles on the question of how to get assistance and protection to those who need it.... So we need some new thinking, because increasingly we are going to be working in these environments. We need to think outside the box.

In the protracted situations you mention, what are the possible solutions?

Durable solutions are voluntary repatriation, local integration or, for a very few, resettlement. There's no one-size-fits-all.... It depends on so many external factors and variables. In some situations, the best solution is voluntary repatriation. In countries like Angola, Liberia, people are longing to go home because they've been living in camps for so many years. In southern Sudan, a good majority want to go home after the peace, but not all because they have other options [in the camps], such as education and other services that they don't have in Sudan. So security and basic services are the two most important variables to decide whether they will return home or not.

I think UNHCR can be instrumental in helping them make an informed decision, by telling them about what is going on back home, by organising go-and-see visits. And then they voluntarily agree, so that's the best situation. That's not possible in some cases. It's not realistic to expect people who've been born and grown up in refugee camps to go home to a country they've never even seen. We have to work with the host government to explain that these people are an asset, they are gainfully employed, they are contributing to the economy, they are productive people and they are such a small number compared to the population of the country. Why not have them locally integrated? That's always the challenge.

Then the third option, resettlement in third countries. It's different from one country to another because the resettlement countries seem to favour certain countries over others for various reasons. In certain situations, happily, we can have thousands of people resettled. In some situations, we would be lucky to have 100 accepted for resettlement.

Tell us about your recent trip to Darfur and UNHCR's strategy for the troubled region

For historical reasons, UNHCR has been quite modest in its programming in Darfur. But lately, we've been approached by the UN humanitarian coordinator [Manuel Aranda da Silva] ... to ask us to rethink. Do we just want to maintain the status quo. The status quo is not bad. We have a presence in West Darfur – one sub-office, four field offices, we have quite a good international presence doing mainly protection work.... But it was felt that we should be more involved because we have the expertise and the needs are ever growing.

So that's why I went out. Actually, I went out simultaneously with a mission that [special adviser on internally displaced people] Dennis McNamara led.... Two sets of team members' brains is better than one.... Happily there was a very good convergence of ideas and I can share it now because this has been endorsed by the High Commissioner [for Refugees António Guterres].

Basically, what we are suggesting is to look at scaling up in a phased manner. Phase one, we're suggesting, is that we consolidate what we have in West Darfur ... and where expansion is needed, you go for it ... so that we can cover basically everything that UNHCR is responsible for – not just protection, but also eventually camp coordination. You need somebody to have a bird's eye view, to coordinate all these various camps [in Darfur] ... and to draw donor attention to the camps that are under-served.

All these various parties, NGOs and others, playing roles in managing the camps need a central body that interfaces with the state authorities ... and what better way than the UN blue flag to have this interface with the state authorities on their behalf. So we do need that role, I see it so clearly. It's easier said than done, but we are now sitting down to chart out a strategy and a path on how we can slowly take over that role and not antagonise others.

For the south, we basically have no programmatic presence. There again, talking to the various interlocutors, there is a need for someone to come in and play the cluster lead role in protection and camp coordination. We would scale up as a phase two after the consolidation in West Darfur. And depending on how things go in West Darfur, obviously.

And then phase three, we would look at North Darfur. Right now the numbers of IDPs in North Darfur are less than in West and South, but it is the place where AU [African Union] forces and the UNMIS [UN Mission in Sudan] are headquartered.... We're suggesting that we have a small liaison presence there for this stage. If the West and South go well, we might expand to North Darfur as cluster leads in camp coordination and protection.

How has UNHCR's increased work with IDPs affected operations?

There's no agency for internal displacement and there probably never will be because it's such a sensitive sovereign issue. You're talking about citizens of a country that are turning to external parties for assistance, including protection. A failed state is another matter, but when you have a sitting government it can be sensitive. The numbers are huge – 25 million and growing – and a lot of governments admit they cannot cope. They need agencies like UNHCR to come in and assist. And in all of the countries in which we are working, the governments bless our presence and the work we are doing – We can only come in and help IDPs at their request.

People often ask me, "Aren't you eating into your stretched capacity already?" But a lot of times a refugee operation works alongside an IDP operation.... If you talk about economies of scale, if you're thinking about cost savings for the international community which sees this as an international obligation, then what is the cheapest way to meet their needs than with an agency already on the ground.

In terms of diverting resources from refugee programmes, there is a slight diversion of some staff to IDP issues. But on the budgetary front and in the field, all these IDP programmes are funded under so-called supplementary appeals – they do not come from the central resources.... It's kind of a difficult situation we're in right now, but as the whole budget reform process goes on this is being debated and I'm just hoping that Excom [UNHCR's Executive Committee] will see this as as good a transitional measure as you can get. On the one hand safeguarding and firewalling the monies that have been raised for refugees and then proving our work with IDPs and thereby attracting resources outside of the central funding.

What are you focusing on in the Iraq operation?

Our new appeal [in January for US$60 million] saw a shift in our emphasis to also assist the countries neighbouring Iraq. They have been most hospitable in receiving Iraqi refugees ... but we have to recognise that there is a breaking point with close to 2 million Iraqis in neighbouring countries. You cannot have a situation where three-quarters of the kids in the public schools are Iraqi and one quarter are local Syrian. We have to come in and problem solve together, for instance with the education ministry.... We must put our money where our mouth is. We have to come up with the funds to do this, whether it's increasing classroom size and increasing school materials, to show the goodwill and appreciation of the international community. That's precisely what we're doing.

The other major thing we are involved in is the whole process of accepting people, registering people.... We're beefing up the registration capacity in neighbouring countries, especially Syria and Jordan. The ultimate goal in this project is to have registered 200,000 people by the end of the year and submitted 20,000 cases for referral for resettlement. We have to have targets otherwise we're just running around like a headless chicken.

Story date: 23 February 2007
UNHCR News Stories

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/45df01e94.html

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Lastest BBC News on Darfur...

Frozenstars — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:31:04 GMT

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6272093.stm

Darfur aid 'on brink of collapse' Fourteen UN aid agencies working in Sudan's troubled Darfur region have warned that their relief operations will collapse unless security improves.
Humanitarian workers, they said, are "holding the line" for the survival and protection of millions in Darfur.
But they need "solid guarantees" of security from all the parties involved in the conflict to be able to continue.
Violence in the western region of Sudan has claimed more than 200,000 lives and led 2.5 million to abandon their homes.
"The UN and its humanitarian partners have effectively been holding the line for the survival and protection of millions," the UN agencies said in the joint statement.
"That line cannot be held much longer."
The UN said that their humanitarian operations in Darfur, which employ almost 14,000 aid workers and costs more than $1bn (£0.5bn, 0.7bn euros), had saved hundreds of thousands of lives since it began in mid-2004.
Shifting frontlines
But the agencies, which include the World Food Programme (WFP), Unicef and the World Health Organisation, said that "malnutrition rates are edging perilously close to the emergency threshold."
Security fears led to the distribution of double food rations in some areas in the month of December, and also prevented some 47,000 people in need being reached, WFP said.
The agencies said that the primary victims of Darfur's conflict are civilians who suffer due to "repeated military attacks, shifting frontlines and fragmentation of armed groups."
A total of 12 aid workers have been killed in the last six months, the statement said - more than the number in the previous two years combined.
Also in the last six months, 30 compounds operated by relief groups, including non-governmental organisations and charities, were directly attacked by armed groups.
The Sudanese government says the instabilty and number of deaths in Darfur have been exaggerated by the west.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

A simple way to help the people of Darfur

ExpandingCircles — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 01:58:20 GMT

Hi all,

I'm so glad I found this tribe! I was searching for ways I can get the word out about helping Darfur. The genocide in Darfur is worse than ever! And I think the only way we can help get them aid is if diplomatic pressure is put on the government of Sudan. Otherwise, international help will not make it to Darfur. :(

There's a petition online that will help. Please sign and pass it on. http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/821715518

Thank you so much!

posted in Sudan - 2 replies

The Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project (ASAP)

Sanaag — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 13:38:12 GMT

ASAP is a concerted effort by Modiba and other partners to help Darfur and raise awareness. Featuring top musicians from around the world, all the proceeds raised by the CD "ASAP" -- over $130,000 thus far -- are benefitting the people suffering in Darfur. More about ASAP on: http://www.modiba.net/asap.html

Modiba has also made a short documentary about the crisis in Darfur and the connection between music and politics that is the basis of ASAP. Featuring Sudan experts, ASAP musicians, and footage from refugee camps the film can be watched on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKaUlIhxb_8

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

In case we needed to be reminded...

Frozenstars — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 04:39:42 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6186991.stm

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Darfur diaries (book and documentary)

Sanaag — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 11:59:31 GMT

www.darfurdiaries.org/thefilm.html
(QuickTime player required)

Synopsis: In October, 2004 a team of three independent filmmakers – Aisha Bain, Jen Marlowe and Adam Shapiro – left for Darfur, Sudan and eastern Chad. After monitoring the worsening political and humanitarian crisis for months and recognizing that the mainstream media offered marginal and inadequate coverage, the team set out with the goal of providing a platform for the people of Darfur (both those displaced inside Darfur and those living in refugee camps in Chad) to speak for themselves about their experiences, their fears, and their hopes for the future. The conflict serves as the ongoing narrative in the film, but the focus is on the people who are living through what has been termed a “genocide.” Through the voices of refugees, displaced persons, and in particular women and children, who are always among the most vulnerable in any conflict situation, this film seeks to provide space for the marginalized victims of atrocities to speak and to engage with the world. Additionally, the film probes the history, culture and heritage of Darfur as a means of deepening understanding of the crisis and complicating easily assumed perceptions by which the conflict is often portrayed (such as a matter of race, ethnicity or religion).

The film presents the Darfurians the filmmakers met (refugees and displaced peoples, civilians and fighters resisting the Sudanese government, child soldiers, teachers, students, parents, children and community leaders) as a people with full lives, culture, and heritage--people with homes that they desperately want to return back to, people undergoing traumatic loss but who demonstrate inspiring strength and resilience, and people whose lives, homes, safety and rights deserve to be protected vigilantly as a fundamental human right.

posted in Sudan - 1 reply

Gettlemen Piece in NYT

johnpowers — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 22:12:09 GMT

I just read a really good piece about Sudan. It's from the NYT but I'll link to it another place because I that's where I saw it http://www.shamarat.net/db/viewtopic.php?t=9291507

The piece is by Jeffrey Gettleman whose reporting from Iraq I admired very much. Lots of people are used to thinking and framing thinking in terms of binary opposites: wrong/right, black/white, good/evil, etc. I'm not sure we can really stop doing this, but we'd be well advised to bare in mind the dangers of muddled thinking that can impose.

Members here have wanted to keep the focus on Darfur. Sudan is a huge country. But in Darfur as in other conflicts like the situation in northern Uganda, there's always a broader context that defies simple explanation. Gettlemen does a great job of showing some of the complexity to Darfur in a short piece.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

UN envoy is told to leave Sudan

Sanaag — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 12:59:39 GMT

The Sudanese government has given the UN envoy in Khartoum, Jan Pronk, three days to leave the country, according to media reports from Sudan.

It follows a statement from the head of the Sudanese army accusing Mr Pronk of spreading false information in an article on his personal website.

The official news agency Suna reported the deadline.

The Sudanese army had called for Mr Pronk to be thrown out, saying he was "waging war against the armed forces".

Resisting pressure

The Sudanese foreign ministry has given Mr Pronk 72 hours to leave the country," Suna said the AFP news agency reported.

"He has until mid-noon on Wednesday to leave," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ali al-Sadig was quoted by the Reuters news agency.

It said comments posted on his personal blog on a UN website that the army was suffering heavy losses in the Darfur region "negatively affects the work of the armed forces".

Sudan is resisting strong international pressure to allow UN peacekeepers to try and end the conflict in DaFormer armed forces spokesman General Mohammed Beshir Suleiman told Suna that Mr Pronk's comments were part of the West's continuing efforts to get Sudan to accept UN troops into Darfur.

More than 200,000 people are thought to have died and two million displaced as a result of the three-year conflict in the Darfur region.

The UN Security Council has passed a resolution calling for 20,000 troops to be sent to Darfur to replace the 7,000 poorly-equipped African Union troops who have failed to end the conflict.

He wrote that there had been hundreds of casualties and prisoners taken, leading to a fall in morale and the sacking of generals.

He also said that pro-government Arab militias were again being mobilised in contravention of UN resolutions.

The Janjaweed militias are accused of widespread atrocities, even genocide.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6074808.stm

Check also Jan Pronk’s weblog: http://janpronk.nl/index120.html

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Darfur rebels demand new talks, self-determination

Sanaag — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 12:58:00 GMT

By Opheera McDoom

KHARTOUM, Oct 19 (Reuters) - A new Darfur rebel alliance is ready for talks with the government but demands self-determination for the war-torn, arid west of the country, senior rebel leaders said on Thursday.

A May peace accord was signed by only one of three negotiating rebel factions and tens of thousands of war victims have rejected it saying it does not give them enough compensation or Darfuris enough political representation.

Following the agreement signed in the Nigerian capital Abuja, non-signatory rebels formed a new alliance called the National Redemption Front (NRF) and renewed hostilities against the government.

"We are ready for talks with the government," said Khalil Ibrahim, a senior member of the NRF. "But we ... will not just accept the Abuja agreement, we want separate talks."

"We now want self-determination, autonomy for Darfur," he added.

Ibrahim said the NRF wanted a similar deal to one reached to end more than two decades of north-south civil war. That agreement gave the south autonomy and the right to a referendum on secession by 2011.

Fighting has escalated in Darfur since the May deal and a struggling cash-strapped African Union force has been powerless to stem the violence.

U.N. envoy to Sudan Jan Pronk said the government lost two battles with the NRF in North Darfur earlier this month and took heavy losses. There was no immediate Sudanese army confirmation.

Thousands of people have fled their homes to escape the latest fighting, sparking warnings of a return to the emergency of 2003 and 2004 when U.N. officials said Darfur was the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Aid agencies say their work has been seriously hampered by the violence and they have been targets of attack.

In September, the aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres France suffered a serious attack and one female staff member was sexually harassed by armed men in the Jebel Marra region.

SIT FOR TALKS

Senior NRF leader Bahr Idriss Abu Garda told Reuters from Darfur field commanders were ready to talk but were waiting for the government.

"If the government is ready to make new talks and add the actual demands of the people of Darfur we are ready to sit for talks," he added.

Foreign Minister Lam Akol said the government had not received any official confirmation of a desire for negotiations from the NRF. The government calls the NRF "terrorists".

The government has repeatedly refused to entertain the idea of secession for Darfur. Khartoum and the rebel faction that signed the Abuja deal have both so far refused to accept any changes or additions to the unpopular agreement.

But the top U.N. envoy in Khartoum has said additions are needed to the deal bring all those non-signatories on board and stop the bloodshed in Darfur.

Mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing central government of neglecting the remote west.

Experts estimate 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million forced from their homes in 3-1/2 years of conflict.

The government armed Arab militias to quell the revolt. The militia, known locally as Janjaweed, stand accused of a campaign of rape, murder and pillage, called genocide by Washington.

Khartoum denies genocide and calls the Janjaweed "bandits". The International Criminal Court is investigating alleged war crimes in the region.

Source: http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=L19221837&WTmodLoc=IntNewsHome_C4_Crises-3

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Escaped Janjaweed confesses his days of slaughter

Sanaag — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 12:55:06 GMT

An Arab shepherd says that for three years he was forced to raze the villages of black Africans in Sudan's Darfur region, Martin Fletcher reports

October 19, 2006

OUTSIDE the back window, Bakerloo Line trains rattle past. Downstairs someone makes tea. But in the upstairs living room of a nondescript house off Lambeth Road in South London a slight, softly spoken young man tells a story of atrocities in a far-off land that is anything but mundane.

Dily, a Sudanese Arab, recounted how for three years he and his fellow Janjaweed charged the farming villages of Darfur on camels and horses, raking the huts with gunfire and shouting: "Kill the slaves. Kill the slaves."

He reckons that he attacked about 30 villages in all, and cannot count the people he shot. The villages were destroyed, he said, and the men, women and children killed - sometimes with the help of government airstrikes.

Survivors "would be left there ... Sometimes they made it to camps but mostly they died of thirst or starvation".

Dily is a rarity in that wretched conflict. Filled with disgust, he escaped and last month, with the help of people-smugglers, reached Britain, where he is seeking political asylum.

Dily contradicts the Sudanese Government's claims that it has no control over the Janjaweed - the predominantly Arab "devils on horseback" who have driven twomillion of Darfur's black Africans into refugee camps and killed at least 200,000.

He claimed the Government deceived innocent Arab shepherds like himself into joining the Janjaweed, saying they had to defend their communities against attack by Darfur's black African rebel groups. They were trained and armed by Sudanese soldiers, ordered by the Government to attack Darfur's villages and given military support. The Janjaweed was formed for ethnic cleansing, he insisted. "Why (else) would you attack villages, kill people, displace them and kill them in their thousands?"

Dily is not his real name. His wife and child remain in Sudan and he fears for their safety if he is identified.

Nor can Dily's story be independently verified, but he specified names, places and events, and spoke with the accent and idiom of the area he said he came from. "He's for real," said Ishag Mekki, deputy chairman of the Darfur Union, which represents Darfuris in Britain. James Smith, chief executive of the Aegis Trust, which campaigns against genocide, agreed: "We've checked his credibility as much as we can and we're convinced he is who he says he is."

The BBC reported yesterday that it had interviewed a former member of the Janjaweed identified only as "Ali", who also admitted to killing villagers in Darfur with government support.

Dily, who is in his early 20s, rarely smiled and fidgeted as he spoke through an interpreter. He said he was tending his family's camel herd in northern Darfur when rebel groups began attacking government targets in 2003: droughts had set black African farmers against nomadic Arabs and the rebels accused the Government of siding with the Arabs.

Dily said he was pressed to join the Janjaweed by tribal elders, who were under pressure from government officials. "We were told we were Arab nomads and we had to protect our lands and our cattle," he said.

Dily went to a training camp near the town of Kebkabiya. Uniformed Sudanese soldiers spent about 20 days teaching hundreds of Janjaweed recruits how to use guns and attack villages, he said.

They were organised into battalions of more than 500 men each. They were paid two million Sudanese pounds ($1173) for the use of their camels and promised a monthly salary of 500,000 Sudanese pounds.

Then they were unleashed. Apart from occasional visits home, Dily and his battalion - led by a former bandit - spent the next three years on the move. "The Government said attack all villages. The local commanders decided which," he said.

Sometimes they used satellite telephones to request airstrikes by the Sudanese military helicopters. "We would see smoke and fire and then we would go in."

The commanders said the villages had to be destroyed. "Mostly they said, 'Kill the blacks. Kill the blacks.' The majority of (the victims) were civilians, most of them women."

Dily denied raping women but said other Janjaweed did. "They took girls and women away, just out of sight, and started to rape them. Sometimes you heard gunshots if they refused."

Dily and his colleagues did not even know what they were fighting for, but faced execution if they disobeyed orders. "I hated the war and I hated the killings and decided to leave and to leave Sudan altogether," he said.

One night he slipped away from the camp and hid in the mountains for three days, then made his way to the town of Kutum. A fellow Arab drove him to Mellit, and from there he was smuggled by car to the Libyan border for 500,000 Sudanese pounds. He reached Italy on a small boat packed with 25 other illegal immigrants, paid more money to get to Paris and was smuggled into Britain.

He arrived somewhere - he thinks Oxford, west of London - on September 20. He was arrested and sent to Croydon in south London to apply for asylum. He lives in a hostel, haunted by memories of burning villages.

The Aegis Trust plans to present Dily's testimony to the International Criminal Court.

The Times

Source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20606686-2703,00.html

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

International Crisis Group urges tough sanctions over Darfur

Sanaag — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 11:38:49 GMT

Getting the UN into Darfur

Nairobi/Brussels, 12 October 2006: With Khartoum continuing to reject the expanded UN mission in Darfur, the international community must take strong economic and legal, and some new military measures to change the regime’s calculation of the costs of non-cooperation.

Getting the UN into Darfur,* the latest policy briefing from the International Crisis Group, examines ways out of the impasse over deploying a major UN peacekeeping force. Pressure on the ruling National Congress Party should include targeted sanctions on key regime figures, an investigation into the offshore accounts of its businesses, encouraging divestment campaigns, some measures against the petroleum sector, maintaining the threat of International Criminal Court prosecutions for atrocity crimes, and moving to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur.

“There is a third way between the current approach of gentle persuasion and a full-scale, non-consensual military intervention”, says John Prendergast, Crisis Group Senior Adviser. “We need a series of economic, legal and more limited military measures that impose a cost on regime officials responsible for continuing the destruction and blocking the UN force”.

On 31 August, Security Council Resolution 1706 authorised a UN mission of at least 20,600 troops and police to deploy to Darfur with a Chapter VII mandate allowing the protective use of forceSudan’s consent for this deployment, which would replace the over-stretched African Union (AU) force, is only “invited” not required, but troop contributing countries are unwilling to take part if Khartoum does not agree.

Getting Khartoum to agree means upping the international pressure with four measures:

applying targeted sanctions, such as asset freezes and travel bans, to key NCP leaders who have already been identified by UN-sponsored investigations as responsible for atrocities in Darfur, and encouraging divestment campaigns;
authorising through the Security Council a forensic accounting firm or a panel of experts to investigate the offshore accounts of the NCP and NCP-affiliated businesses so as to pave the way for economic sanctions against the regime’s commercial entities;
exploring sanctions on aspects of Sudan’s petroleum sector, to include at least bars on investment and provision of technical equipment and expertise ; and
planning to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur by French and U.S. assets in the region, with NATO support; obtaining Chad’s consent to a rapid-reaction force on its Sudan border; and, if everything else fails to change government policies and the situation worsens, contingency planning for non-consensual deployment of 40,000 to 50,000 peace enforcers to Darfur.
The U.S., UN, AU and European Union, should act together to the greatest extent possible but as necessary in smaller constellations and even unilaterally.

“Strengthening the AU is not a long-term solution. Non-consensual deployment criteria are not yet met – there remain steps to try, and it would be desperately difficult, risking making matters for civilians even worse”, says David Mozersky, Horn of Africa Project Director. “But if the situation continues to deteriorate, and the NCP still refuses UN peacekeepers, there may be no other way”.

Source: International Crisis Group
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=4442&l=1&m=1

The whole document is available on:
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=4442&l=1

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Sudanese VP Supports U.N. Peacekeepers

Sanaag — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 08:55:45 GMT

Sudanese VP Supports U.N. Peacekeepers
Says Sudan's Government Is Incapable Of Protecting Civilians In Darfur

KHARTOUM, Sudan, Sept. 16, 2006

(AP) One of Sudan's two vice presidents said in remarks published Saturday that he would accept the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region.

First Vice President Salva Kiir Mayardit, head of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement — a former southern rebel group that now shares power in Khartoum — was quoted by the independent Al-Sudani daily as saying the Sudanese government was incapable of protecting civilians in Darfur, and called on the United Nations to intervene.

“The aggravation of the humanitarian and security situation in Darfur necessitates intervention of international forces to protect civilians from the atrocities of the Janjaweed militias so long as the government is not capable of protecting them,” Kiir was quoted as saying at the close of an SPLM politburo meeting held in the southern city of Juba late Friday.

The U.N. wants to take over Darfur peacekeeping from a largely ineffective African Union force — something the Khartoum government has refused.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, in an opinion piece to be published Sunday, urged Sudan to accept the peacekeeping force and push ahead the political process.

“There can be no military solution to the crisis in Darfur,” Annan wrote in an item sent to newspapers around the world for publication Sunday, when non-governmental organizations across the globe are planning activities to raise public awareness on Darfur.

“All parties should have understood by now, after so much death and destruction that only a political agreement, in which all stakeholders are fully engaged, can bring real peace to the region,” Annan wrote in the item that the U.N. e-mailed to The Associated Press.

Sudan's junior foreign affairs minister, Al-Samani Al-Wasila, told Sawt Al-Arab (Voice of the Arabs) Radio on Saturday that the best thing the international community could do for Sudan was to support the Darfur Peace Agreement instead of planning to deploy international forces. He also stressed that peace must be achieved by the people of Sudan themselves, not outside forces.

The Darfur conflict began in early 2003, when ethnic African tribes revolted against the Khartoum government, which was accused of unleashing Arab militiamen blamed for rapes and killings. At least 200,000 people have died.

The Darfur Peace Agreement, signed in May in Abuja, Nigeria, calls for a cease-fire, disarmament of militias and a protection force for civilians — but does not specify the composition of such a force.

Last month, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding a better-funded, larger and more well-equipped U.N. mission take over Darfur peacekeeping duties from the African Union. But the resolution was unlikely to take effect without the consent of the Sudanese government, something nations including the United States have worked — without success — to acquire.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir says a switch in command would violate the country's sovereignty and has warned that his army would fight any U.N. forces sent to Darfur.

In a meeting in Washington in June, U.S. President George W. Bush pressed Kiir to accept a U.N. force in Darfur. But the SPLM leader sidestepped the issue, saying only that “we are sure that we are going to solve the problem so that we don't hear about rapes and killings in Darfur.”

On Friday, Bush said it could be time to send international peacekeepers into Darfur over the objections of the government in Khartoum.

“What you'll hear is, well, the government of Sudan must invite the United Nations in for us to act,” Bush said. “Well, there are other alternatives, like passing a U.N. resolution saying we're coming in with a U.N. force in order to save lives.”

Kiir's group signed a peace agreement with the Sudanese government in January 2005, laying down its arms after 21 years of civil war — Africa's longest war.

Some see that peace deal as a model for resolving the Darfur conflict. Kiir participated in the Abuja talks that led to the signing the Darfur Peace Agreement, and his organization is believed to have influence over the Darfur rebels, though their conflicts were not related.

The newspaper also quoted SPLM Secretary-General Bagan Amom as calling on al-Bashir's National Congress Party to “accept deployment of U.N. forces in Darfur to avert clashes with the international community.”

Amom said the SPLM would “work at convincing the National Congress (Party) to agree to the deployment of U.N. forces in Darfur.”

The January 2005 peace accord provided for an autonomous south with its own army, national power and wealth-sharing, religious freedom and a new constitution during a six-year interim period. After those six years, the 10 southern states will hold a referendum on independence.

Sudan has a unity government, in which Kiir now serves as first vice president, in addition to his post as the south's president.

The southern government's Cabinet has 70 percent representation from the SPLM, 15 percent from al-Bashir's northern ruling National Democratic Party and 15 percent from other southern parties.

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/16/world/main2015581.shtml

posted in Sudan - 2 replies

"Voices for Darfur" DVD released

Sanaag — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 09:19:45 GMT

In December 2004, some of the music industry's most illustrious artists joined up with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra at London's Royal Albert Hall for a special concert to raise funds for the victims of the conflict in Darfur.

Now, EMI has released the DVD of the concert, the proceeds of which will also go to support the UN refugee agency's work in Darfur and Chad. The DVD features additional exclusive songs by Sade, David Gray and Franz Ferdinand, as well as backstage footage from the concert, and is already attracting some high praise from music critics (see Reviews).

More on:http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/events?id=%204337e98e2

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Hundreds of Thousands Demand Peace in Darfur

Sanaag — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 09:06:51 GMT

Hundreds of Thousands Demand Peace in Darfur

Haider Rizvi
OneWorld US
Mon., Sep. 18, 2006

NEW YORK, Sep 18 (OneWorld) - Human rights and peace activists in many parts of the world took to the streets Sunday protesting the international community's failure to stop the ongoing bloody ethnic conflict in Sudan's Darfur region.

In addition to organizing events in dozens of cities and towns across the world, activist communities also held prayers and protest meetings in New York, Toronto, London, Berlin, Paris, Cairo, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Rio de Janeiro.

Condemning the Sudanese government for its partisan role in the conflict, protesters demanded that Khartoum immediately accept the United Nations decision to deploy an international force in Darfur, where innocent civilians continue to suffer from death and displacement.

In a resolution adopted early this month, the 15-member Security Council agreed to send more than 17,000 international peacekeepers to the region, but fierce opposition from Khartoum has left the plan's implementation in doubt.

The resolution, which was not endorsed by Russia, China, or Qatar, cannot be applied unless Khartoum nods its approval because it requires the "consent" of the Sudanese government for the deployment of the UN force. In rejecting the UN resolution, the Sudanese argued that they could address the issue of civilian protection by using their own military might in the region.

But critics, including some senior UN officials, strongly doubt the Sudanese government could enforce peace while its military continues to bomb civilian areas in Darfur. Reports from the region claim scores of people have died and some 50,000 displaced as a result of aerial attacks on villages by the Sudanese military since May when a peace agreement was reached between Khartoum and one of the main rebel groups.

For its part, the Khartoum government has repeatedly denied the incidents of bombings and has described such reports as "exaggerations." However, senior UN officials and relief organizations active in the region say there has been no let up in military atrocities against civilians population since the signing of the peace agreement and that thousands continue to flee their homes every day.

"The situation on the ground is serious, is desperate," Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, told OneWorld last week. In response to Khartoum's assertion that it can handle the situation on its own, Annan added, "If the government had been able to do it itself, I don't think we would be having this debate."

Annan said that in recent days he worked with "quite a few governments" to try to get Khartoum to show "some flexibility," but acknowledged that his efforts "have so far not been successful."

Currently, about 7,000 African Union (AU) troops are stationed in Darfur, the only force that is providing security to the civilian population to some degree, but their mandate is due to expire by the end of this month. Since its deployment, the AU force has repeatedly complained about the lack of adequate funding and equipment. Groups involved in humanitarian operations fear that the departure of AU troops would lead to further bloodshed and violence.

"The situation is deteriorating with each passing day," said Ken Bacon, president of Refugees International, a U.S.-based humanitarian organization, in a statement urging the African Union Peace and Security Council to extend the mandate of its force in Darfur until UN troops can be deployed. Bacon, who has visited the region several times, said the United States and the international community must ensure that the AU has the funds it needs to do its job.

"As a start, the U.S. Congress should pass current legislation that provides an additional $20 million to support the AU force," he added in a statement.

Other human rights groups have repeatedly called for the international community to impose sanctions against senior Khartoum officials who are blocking peace efforts. Annan and other UN officials have also endorsed such calls, but such a move is unlikely to materialize unless all Security Council members reach a consensus.

In the past diplomats from Russia and China have expressed their reservations about sanctions and many believe that both the veto-wielding powers are still opposed to adopting such measures.

"The only thing at this moment we can do is to keep the African Union alive," a UN official close to Annan told OneWorld. "That's the only game in town."

The African Union is due to discuss the future of the AU force Monday, when many of its leaders attend the UN General Assembly meeting at the world body's headquarters in New York. Sudanese government officials have reportedly indicated they may allow AU troops to remain in the country past their September 30 departure deadline to buy time until a more permanent solution can be negotiated if the mission recieves increased support from the international community.

Sunday's "Global Day for Darfur" events were organized by the Save Darfur Coalition, an umbrella group representing more than 30 major groups working for peace, human rights, and justice throughout the world. The New York City crowd, which was estimated between 20,000 and 30,000, called on United States officials to use their country's diplomatic muscle to press Khartoum to accept the UN peacekeeping force.

Source: http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/139512/1/

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Clooney on Darfur

mrcurtain — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 03:43:24 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHfuk2bfgrw

Watch this!

A deadline is approaching. We must do all that we can to raise awareness on this issue.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Global Day For Darfur

johnpowers — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 02:32:56 GMT

Sanaag mentioned this in the previous thread. Sunday September 17th is the Global Day for Darfur http://www.dayfordarfur.org/About_Us.htm

Add your name: http://www.dayfordarfur.org/Thank_You.htm

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Tribe Name

mrcurtain — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 02:22:21 GMT

Did the name of this tribe change recently?

If this is a tribe about the genocide in Darfur then I think that another name might be more appropriate.

I've traveled through Sudan, Sudan is a massive country and there really is much more to the country than just what is going on in Darfur.

posted in Sudan - 4 replies

Blogger Sudanese Thinker

johnpowers — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 05:26:09 GMT

This blogger's perspective on Darfur and UN troops is interesting:

http://sudanesethinker.blogspot.com/2006/07/savedarfurorg-pushing-for-un-troops.html

Darfur previously = Disaster

Darfur now = STILL a disaster but to a lesser extent

Darfur + UN troops = Bigger disaster

Darfur + AU troops reinforced by UN & NATO = HUGE improvements.

Darfur + UN troops + Al Qaeda = One big ass GIGANTIC Disaster !!!

posted in Sudan - 1 reply

we have killed your god

acoustichrmny — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 18:25:47 GMT

http://www.harpers.org/WeHaveKilledYourGod.html
---
We Have Killed Your God

Posted on Monday, September 11, 2006. From interviews with Darfuri refugees conducted in Chad, by Amnesty International, for its 2004 report “Darfur: Rape as a Weapon of War.”. Originally from Harper's Magazine, August 2006.

I was in Khartoum for many years, but when I found out what happened in my home, I returned to Darfur. On the way, the janjaweed stopped my truck, and we had to give them all our belongings. They kept three people, and we don’t know what happened to them. After I arrived at Furo Baranga, I was in a shop when the janjaweed came and took me and another man to a camp, three kilometers to the north. They told me that I am a rebel and that I should shut up. They tied my arms and legs and left me under a tree for five hours. Next they tied my legs to my body, put a stick under my knees, and tied my hands behind my back. They took all my clothes, and I was naked. They hung me upside down from the tree, by the stick under my knees. Then they swung me back and forth. I was beaten with sticks and whips. They left me hanging upside down with another person until morning. For three days they beat us every day, and at night they hung us upside down under the tree. They gave us no food and only a little water. They rubbed pili pili [hot pepper] in our eyes and noses. They put blankets around our heads and tied them very tight. On the fourth day, they told me and another local leader to dig a well for them. While we worked, they poured cold water over our hot bodies but refused to give us water to drink, and sometimes they would fire guns at us. One day they showed me a letter and told me, “This is a letter from our leader. He orders us to kill you.” They put a red cloth around my neck as a sign that I would be killed. Four days later, another janjaweed came and told me, “You with the red cloth, you are chosen to die. If you pay, you can save yourself.” They asked for 200,000 Sudanese pounds. When they let me go, they said, “We are now letting you go, even though our leader said we must kill you. This is only our kindness.”
—A., a male refugee from Magarsa

The janjaweed said during the attack, “You are complicit with the opponents, you are blacks, no black can stay here, and no black can stay in Sudan.” Arab women were accompanying the attackers singing songs in praise of the government and encouraging the attackers. The women said, “The blood of the blacks runs like water. We take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land. The power belongs to the Arabs, and we will kill you until the end, you blacks. We have killed your God.” They also insulted the women from the village, saying, “You are gorillas, you are black, and you are badly dressed.”
—M., a male village chief from Disa

The janjaweed destroyed the village and took everything. None of us had arms, so we were not able to resist the attack. From me they took one grain mill, one donkey, ten cows, two goats, and the full harvest of groundnut and sorghum. They were young men, and they sang songs of disrespect. They shouted, “We will get rid of the blacks, all of you. We know you are going to Chad. You will not be protected there and you will not be protected in Sudan. You have no place to go now.” When I left, I did not know if my wife and children were alive. I soon realized that nobody cared what happened to us.

Some women were raped. We heard about this, but only those who are not married can talk about it. We believe that nobody can become pregnant when raped, because you cannot have a child from unwanted sex. The women in the camps in Darfur, those whom they rape day and night—they might become pregnant. Then only Allah can help the child to look like the mother. If an Arab child is born, this cannot be accepted.

It is cheap to get married now. You are lucky if you find somebody for your daughter to marry. And the age of the girls is going down—they are very young now. The families are happy to get rid of their daughters, especially in a refugee camp, where there is no control over the girls. Girls are more difficult because you have to take care of their honor, and they are more expensive. For boys you need only soap.
—M., a male refugee from Kenyu

I was looking after goats when I was arrested by the janjaweed. They took me to a camp in Abu Jidad where there were also army soldiers. They asked me where the goats were and beat me when I didn’t answer. They tied up my sexual organ with a rope and pulled from both sides each time they asked a question. They beat me several times a day. When I told them where the goats were, they stopped beating me. Eight other children, who were not from my village, received the same treatment. They are still there. As for me, I was able to escape.
—A., a fifteen-year-old boy from Goz Um Bela

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Darfur Trembles as Peacekeepers’ Exit Looms

johnpowers — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 19:15:38 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/world/africa/10darfur.html?ex=1158120000&en=2e66449d7a14406d&ei=5087%0ADarfur

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Tim Nonn

Annie — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 20:34:54 GMT

Darfur Redding (California) is hosting a potluck/discussion with Tim Nonn (founder of Dear Sudan) tonight. I'm looking forward to meeting him. Afterwards we're having a prayer vigil on the Sundial Bridge.

posted in Sudan - 1 reply

for kids: Camp Darfur Comix

evonne — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 23:04:24 GMT

In the spring a collaborative group of supporters created Camp Darfur, a live and virtual experience to raise public awareness on genocide and displacement in the Sudan. We have created a touring exhibition and a virtual camp in Second Life where anyone can see a bit of what is going on and what we can do halfway across the world to help. http://www.campdarfur.org

Some of our team will be traveling to the Sudan and Chad later this year. Gabriel Stauring traveled there last year and filmed 21 days of videoblogs called iACT (interactive activism), hosted on his website at http://www.stopgenocide.now

In May my studio created the Camp Darfur Comix, a students' guide to Darfur with an introduction to this crisis and simple ways to get involved. This is not suitable for young kids (it uses the word rape and defines "genocide") but older students are welcome to request copies by sending me a message or by visiting Camp Darfur on the road.

posted in Sudan - 3 replies

Hello? Is anyone there?

mrcurtain — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 19:30:37 GMT

Not a post in months? What's going on? Has everyone just forgotten about Darfur?

posted in Sudan - 5 replies

Chad and Sudan unite over rebels

johnpowers — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 00:00:28 GMT

BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5218064.stm

Fontaine at Yebo Gogo http://americanafrican.blogspot.com/2006/07/chad-sudan-reach-rebel-agreement.html writes:

It appears the situation would be bad enough as is, but Khartoum and N'Djamena arming rival militias only hurts the situation. This agreement could have some long-term benefits, but will one side stand idly by when its sponsored rebel group weakens?

Good question.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Darfur rebel to meet US president

johnpowers — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 00:47:17 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5213038.stm

Africa Action Pumping up the Power to Protect PDF file) http://www.africaaction.org/campaign_new/docs/PumpingUpthePowertoProtect.pdf

The first action we would like for you to participate in is in an email campaign to tell President Bush to call President Al Bashir with the message that the future of U.S. Sudan relations depends on the deployment of UNPKO in Darfur. This letter will urge President Bush to pick up the phone and call President Al Bashir by August 1st or we will “hang up” on the Bush Administration for failing to protect the people of Darfur!

http://capwiz.com/africaaction/issues/alert/?alertid=8930051&type=PR

posted in Sudan - 1 reply

Darfur awareness event - San Diego

Skandar — Sun, 28 May 2006 00:05:58 GMT

My sister has put a lot of time and effort into organizing this event and I am extremely proud of her. If any of you live near SD or have friends that do, please get the word out. This will be a fun and educational event with drink specials and great raffle prizes. She is still looking around for raffle prizes so if you know of any person or business that may be willing to donate to a worthy cause, please send me a message. Here is my sister's offical message.

Host: Nadia Rassas
Location: Coaster Saloon
744 Ventura Place, San Diego, CA View Map
When: Saturday, June 17, 6:00pm
I am hosting a fundraiser on Saturday June 17th to bring awareness to the people of Dafur, Sudan. I have created this Darfur Awareness Event to give you the opportunity to educate yourselves on the plight of those whose lives are more difficult than most of us can even imagine. I have the wonderful opportunity to give the people of Darfur a voice. It may be a faint voice, but I hope to do all that I can to make sure as many people hear me as possible.

Dafur is a small region in the western part of Sudan and the Sudanese government is responsible for crimes against humanity in the context of an internal conflict. Open warfare erupted in Darfur in early 2003, and the Janjaweed militias have, over the past three years, received government support to ‘clear’ civilians from areas considered disloyal. Militia attacks and a scorched earth policy have lead to massive displacement, indiscriminant killings, looting, and mass rape. The region of Darfur is acknowledged to be “a humanitarian and human rights tragedy of the first order.” Over 400,000 people have been murdered. It is simply genocide.

So I would like to invite you to support my efforts in raising funds to help end this crisis. Come on down to Coaster Saloon (Mission Beach) on June 17th at 6pm. There will be drink specials and a fundraising raffle with prizes sponsored by the Paul Mitchell School, Salon Massimo in La Jolla, as well as other generous gifts from local businesses.

$10 at the door includes a raffle ticket.
($20 will get you 3. $30 will get you 10.)

All Proceeds will go to the Save Durfur Coalition

posted in Sudan - 1 reply

Urgent!!! Please help

mentalfreedomne1 — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 05:29:37 GMT

I am posting this everywhere I can, Please help us.
There are thousands of good people who could potentially lose their lives very soon.

Since the release of the information on the Sujiatun concentration camp in China, which is reported to do live organ harvesting on Falun Gong practicioners. More people have been stepping forward to reveal information. Recently, a veteran military doctor in the region of Shenyang said that the Sujiatun Concentration camp is just one of 36 such camps. Another camp in Jilin Province referred to as 672-S is said to hold over 120,000 people.

According to the Integrated Committee's announcement, transplant hospitals in China are now telling patients to "come in quickly" to get transplants. Patients are told that matching organs can be found at this time in as short as one or two days. The hospitals are also reported to say that, "it will be difficult after this batch of organs is used up."

We fear that there is going to be a mass execution to “hide the evidence” and get rid of witnesses. PLEASE HELP us, Falun Gong practitioners around the world are requesting an international investigation while there is still time.

This is the US petition, please sign it. It can save someone’s life.
http://www.fofg.org/act/act_petition.php?pid=1

you can also help by going here:
http://publicpetition.unvcc.com/UN/index.php
this is an easy, fill in the blank letter that with a click is automatically
sent to the senators and representatives of your choice
And it would also greatly help us if you would please pass this information on.

Thank you,
Joshua

You can learn more about this at:
The Epoch Times
http://www.theepochtimes.com/211,111,,1.html
Amnesty International
http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/chn-summary-eng
Falun Dafa Information Center
http://www.faluninfo.net/why/index.asp
or, you can ask me any questions you have by sending me a message.

posted in Sudan - 1 reply

abramoff offered to aid sudan,envoy says

acoustichrmny — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 20:16:31 GMT

Abramoff Offered to Aid Sudan, Envoy Says
By Tom Hamburger and Ken Silverstein
The Los Angeles Times

Tuesday 04 April 2006

The former lobbyist sought millions to help the sanctioned nation clean up its image, the country's ambassador and an ex-associate say.

Washington - Two eyewitnesses say that former lobbyist Jack Abramoff proposed to sell his services to the much-criticized government of Sudan to help improve its abysmal reputation in the United States, especially among Christian evangelicals who were campaigning against human rights violations in the troubled African nation.

Khidir Haroun Ahmed, Sudan's ambassador to the United States, said in an interview that Abramoff proposed a multimillion-dollar lobbying contract in late 2001 but that the proposal was "never seriously considered" by the Sudanese. He declined to elaborate.

The story Ahmed and a former Abramoff associate tell about the solicitation of Sudan, which the U.S. had sanctioned for its record on terrorism and rights violations, is a striking example of the kind of aggressive machinations of Abramoff as spelled out in the criminal cases against him. The super-lobbyist made tens of millions of dollars representing - and sometimes defrauding - corporations, foreign clients and American Indian gambling interests.

A spokesman for Abramoff, Andrew Blum, confirmed that a conversation took place between Abramoff and the ambassador but said Abramoff never sought a contract and rejected working for the Sudanese because of that country's human rights record.

The ambassador and the former associate of Abramoff dispute Blum's account. The former associate said the ex-lobbyist discussed the possible contract while sitting with the ambassador in Abramoff's skybox at Washington's Fed-Ex field during a Redskin football game in late 2001.

The former associate, who did not want to be named out of fear it might damage future business opportunities, said that Abramoff proposed a $16- to $18-million contract - "a staggering sum" for the destitute nation - but one that the lobbyist considered reasonable because international disapproval was so costly to Sudan's economy.

For more than two decades, a civil war divided Sudan's Arab-Muslim government in the north and the mainly Christian and animist south.

Abramoff offers a different account of events. Blum, his spokesman said the lobbyist did not suggest any sums to the Sudanese but rather "objected in explicit terms to Sudan's treatment of Christians." He said Abramoff remembered the encounter "because he felt it was deeply embarrassing to the ambassador at the time."

Blum said any specifics, such as fees and contacts, were discussed only by the former associate, not by Abramoff.

"Mr. Abramoff never contemplated nor did he undertake this representation," Blum said.

The reported proposal to Sudan seems to fit Abramoff's willingness as a lobbyist to take on most any client who would pay the bills. He collected a $1.2-million fee from the Malaysian government and boasted of arranging a 2002 meeting with President Bush for that country's president, who was known for making derogatory comments about Jews.

Abramoff pleaded guilty in January to fraud, tax evasion and conspiring to bribe public officials. He was sentenced in federal court in Florida last week to 5 years and 10 months in prison in connection with a casino boat venture.

To his clients, Abramoff offered connections to his well-placed contacts in the Bush administration, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, especially among Republicans.

In the case of Sudan, the former associate said Abramoff invoked his connections to Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition who is running for lieutenant governor in Georgia. Reed had worked with Abramoff and other now-powerful conservatives decades earlier in the College Republicans organization.

In a statement, Reed's spokeswoman, Lisa Baron, said, "Under no circumstances would he have worked on behalf of the Sudan and he has never done so."

For years, Sudan has been a galvanizing issue for Christian conservatives, including the Christian Coalition. They aggressively lobbied both the Clinton and Bush administrations to side with Christians and other rebels in southern Sudan.

In January 2005, the two sides signed a peace agreement that finally ended the long civil war, in which both sides committed atrocities. The conflict left 1.5 million people dead and 4 million displaced, and left the economy in tatters. In 2003, a separate conflict broke out in the western region of Darfur, leaving more than 180,000 dead and displacing more than 2 million people. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell accused Sudan of committing genocide.

Abramoff's contact with the Sudanese was reported briefly by the National Journal in 2004.

According to the lobbyist's former associate, Abramoff sat with the ambassador in the skybox and described an elaborate and costly plan to blunt the effect of pressure from Christian groups with money and travel, two of the methods Abramoff frequently deployed in his Washington lobbying campaigns.

He said some of the money would be sent to the Christian Coalition and some would be spent encouraging Christian leaders to visit Sudan and talk with the government. Other money would be spent on a grass-roots campaign to promote a better image of the country in the United States.

The former associate said Abramoff repeatedly told the ambassador that he would arrange for his friend Reed to push the idea with Christian groups.

There was a follow-up discussion with the former associate when the Sudanese foreign minister came to Washington months later. The Cabinet minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, met with Abramoff's former associate at the Sudanese Embassy. Ismail seemed interested in Abramoff's services, the former associate said, but asked for guaranteed results, which Abramoff could not provide. The proposed deal went no further.

The idea of representing Sudan was first broached by Abramoff to his onetime associate in early 2002, the associate recalled. "Abramoff waved two videotapes at me that were made by a Christian rights organization and said that the tapes showed the need for Sudan to have Washington representation that could relieve this kind of pressure," he said.

A group called the Persecution Project had produced a video called "Sudan: The Hidden Holocaust," which a brochure said "reveals the unknow? struggle of the African Christian tribes of central and southern Sudan who are presently engaged in a life-and-death battle against radical Moslem invaders from the north." Sudan has denied such accusations and said the Christian groups exaggerated the problems.

"Sudan was a hot-button issue that was at the forefront of our work and the work of many other [Christian] groups," said Matt Chancey, a spokesman for the Persecution Project.

Chancey said that in 2002 the groups were heavily lobbying Congress and the White House to maintain economic sanctions against Sudan, which had originally been imposed by the Clinton administration.

"We believed our government was appeasing the government of Sudan and not holding their feet to the fire," Chancey said.

At the time, the country, which was once a haven for Osama bin Laden, was under sanctions prohibiting tourist travel and doing any business with the government. To lobby for the government of Sudan requires a waiver from the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Help the victims, confront the perps, ventilate the facts

keylawk — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 07:21:43 GMT

HELP the hungry. The real problem now is water. How is that being addressed? Migration (fleeing the destroyed villages).

CONFRONT the perpetrators. Not just the competing janjaweed tribes. Confront the "leaders" who are benefitting and funding sources -- religious leaders, radio hosts, rich Arabs who are supporting the expansion of Arab influence by genocidal removal of others.

We want NAMES.

VENTILATE this holocaust. The journalists of the world who are witnessing the events are themselves not being heard. It is not possible to understand this indifference. This is part of the unraveling of Africa which continues and which must be stopped. Financial aid seems to be part of the problem.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Good Article that really explains the Darfur situation

TechGoose — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 06:21:30 GMT

Death in Darfur
Murder on a Mass Scale

http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2006/04/02/news-darfur2-04-02.html

By Genie Abrams
Times Herald-Record
gabrams@th-record.com
It's genocide: the deliberate and systematic extermination of one racial, national, political, ethnic, cultural or religious group by another.

It's happening today, in a place called Darfur.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote, "Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe."

For most people, Darfur is not the center of their universe. It's just the troubled western region of the African nation of Sudan. But for many, turning away from Darfur is not an option. Why not?

Where and what is Darfur?

Darfur is a harsh, dry region of 7 million residents on the western edge of Sudan.

On Africa's east coast, Sudan is bordered to the north by Egypt and Libya and on the northeast by the Red Sea. In all other directions, it is encircled by seven nations. They are, clockwise from the Red Sea: Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic and Chad.

"Darfur" is an Arabic word meaning "region of the Fur people." The Fur are black subsistence farmers who live in the south of Darfur, working ever-poorer land as the northern desert encroaches on them. Arabic-speaking, Muslim camel-herders in the north make up 39 percent of Darfur's population.

The black residents are mostly animists, who believe that natural objects have souls. Five percent are Christians.

What is happening there?

In June 1989, Maj. Gen. Omar Hassan al-Bashir took power in Sudan by staging a coup with a group of his fellow military officers against the elected government. He is an Islamist who runs the nation according to sharia (Islamic law).

In 2003, two black rebel groups attacked government military installations. In response, a bloodthirsty, terrorist-style militia group called janjaweed received government support to clear civilians from "disloyal" areas, meaning Darfur. They have been raiding black villages and killing civilians ever since.

The World Food Program, the United Nations and the Coalition for International Justice estimate that 2.5 million people have been displaced, 3.5 million are hungry and 400,000 have died in Darfur since the 2003 uprising began.

The Reuters Foundation's AlertNet reports widespread massacres, rape, torture and looting. And through it all, Bashir has refused to allow humanitarian aid like food, water and medicine into Darfur. The U.N. warns of mass starvation and epidemics and calls it "one of the world's worst humanitarian crises."

What about now?

Now there's a severe cholera outbreak, also. Cholera is caused by contaminated water, and without treatment, you can die within hours of contracting it. Most of the Fur people live near water supplies that are usually safe. But they have had to flee for their lives to unfamiliar areas with unsafe water.

First reported in January, the outbreak has spread quickly. By Feb. 21, 1,864 cases and 45 deaths were reported from cholera - and those are just the ones that Doctors Without Borders (see below) knows about.

Relief workers are rushing to get desperately needed water, as well as food and medicine, to the people, but much of it never arrives. The U.N. says Khartoum is restricting people's access to aid agencies and journalists, despite promises to the contrary. The Belgian-based think tank International Crisis Group says Khartoum is using delays in the peace process to further its genocidal agenda in Darfur.

Are there ties to oil?

Possibly. Khartoum announced in April 2005 that its ABCO Corporation had started drilling in Darfur and that it expects the oil field to be a large one. Darfur residents might be in the way.

What is the world doing?

Not much. The international community is failing to protect civilians or to influence the Sudanese government to do so. The 22-member African Union, of which Sudan is a member, has condemned attacks on civilians in general but remained silent about Sudan's atrocities in Darfur. More than a year ago, the U.S. House and Senate both voted unanimously to condemn the genocide but had no effect on actually ending it. The United Nations has so far failed to send any semblance of an adequate peacekeeping force to Darfur. Such a force is needed simply to allow humanitarian supplies into the region.

There are two shining exceptions to the apathy:

- Doctors Without Borders (www.doctorswithoutborders.org) is an international not-for-profit health-care organization that runs four programs in Darfur covering 300,000 people. Their team includes 27 aid workers and more than 580 Sudanese nationals. They run mobile clinics as well as clinics at displaced-person camps. You can make a tax-deductible donation to Doctors Without Borders by going to its Web site or by calling them at 888-392-0392. Either way, they will honor your request that your money be designated for Darfur.

- At the Save Darfur Coalition (www.savedarfur.org) Web site, you can also send an online postcard to President Bush reminding him that he wrote o f the Rwandan genocide: "Not on my watch," and asking him to support "a stronger multinational force to protect the citizens of Darfur." It also has a link to www.millionvoicesfordarfur.org, where you can donate money or sign up for the April 30 Rally Against Genocide (see below).

Dr. Pauline Horrill, Doctors Without Borders' program manager for Sudan, says on the group's Web site that every delay or reduction in supplies "can almost immediately worsen families' nutritional status. There's a continued suffering that affects all the displaced persons in the camps: the lack of hope that the situation will change."

Genocide isn't easy to look at. But sometimes, looking at something awful is easier if you know that there's something you can do about it. Some of your neighbors are doing something about it, and you can, too. Some of the things you can do might be very effective, and they will only cost you the price of a stamp or a phone call. Please, take a look.

In July 2004, Elie Wiesel addressed the Darfur Emergency Summit in New York City, convened by the American Jewish World Service. He said:

"Sudan has become today's world capital of human pain, suffering and agony. There, one part of the population is being subjected by another part, the dominating part, to humiliation, hunger and death ... A million human beings, young and old, have been uprooted, deported. Women are being raped, children are dying of disease, hunger, and violence. ...

"How can a citizen of a free country not pay attention? How can anyone, anywhere not feel outraged? How can a person, whether religious or secular, not be moved by compassion? And above all, how can anyone who remembers remain silent? ...

"Not to assist Sudan's victims today would for me be unworthy of what I have learned from my teachers, my ancestors and my friends, namely that God alone is alone: His creatures must not be."

What Can I Do to Help?

1. Contact U.S. Sens. Charles E. Schumer and Hillary Clinton and your own representative in the House. Their contact information is listed below, or make an appointment to see them face-to-face. Tell them you want them to support an international peacekeeping force in Sudan that will allow adequate food and health-care supplies and personnel to reach the areas of Darfur where they are needed and to stay as long as they are needed. Add that you would like to know how they stand on this issue and what they're going to do about it.

2. Write letters to the editor at letters@th-record.com. Legislators, religious leaders, and other key decision-makers read the paper and will know how important this issue is to their constituencies and community.

3. Attend the April 30 "Rally to Stop Genocide" on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. President Bush has been invited to speak. Updated information about the rally can be found online at www.savedarfur.org.

Your senators and representatives:

Sue Kelly: 2182 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515; 202-225-5441; Orange County office: Orange County Government Center, 255 Main St., 3rd floor, Goshen, NY 10924; 845-291-4100.

Maurice Hinchey: 2431 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515; 202-225-6335; Orange County office: City Hall, 3rd floor, 16 James St., Middletown, NY 10940; 845-344-3211. Ulster County office: 291 Wall St., Kingston, NY 12401, 845-331-4466; Sullivan County office: 18 Anawana Lake Road, Monticello, NY 12701; 845-791-7116.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer: 313 Hart Senate Building, Washington, DC 20510, 202-224-6542; Hudson Valley office: P.O. Box A, Red Hook, NY 12571; 845-758-9741.

Sen. Hillary Clinton: 476 Russell Senate Building, Washington, DC 20510, 202-224-4451.

Quick Facts about Sudan

Capital: Khartoum, in the north-central part of the eastern half of the country.

Size: 1,553,602 square miles (six times the size of Texas)

Median age: 18

Life expectancy: Men, 57.3; women, 59.8; median, 58.54.

Population: 40,187,486 (twice the population of Texas). Sudan is divided between mostly Muslim Arabs in the north and Christian or animist black Africans in the south.

Government: The president is 59-year-old Maj. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir, an Islamist who runs the nation according to sharia (Islamic law). In June 1989, he staged a coup with a group of his fellow military officers against the elected government of Sadiq al-Mahdi. He has been president ever since, running the country with a coalition of the National Congress Party and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Camp Darfur and the Convoy for Peace

evonne — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 19:28:21 GMT

www.campdarfur.org

This campaign is in the early stages, launching in one week and making the trek crosscountry to DC for a rally with the Save Darfur coalition on April 30th. Together we are rallying support in the US for divestment while educating the public (kids and families) on this complex situation and our shared legacy of genocide.

Camp Darfur opens April 7th in LA with five days of film screenings with special guests, interactive exhibits and a final night Light A Fire ceremony and concert honoring those who struggle hard to light a fire and survive in displacement camps. Lawmakers and other leaders are joining us for a series of discussions on site in LA and around the country leading up to the April 30th rally. We are expecting ~1000 visitors a day to the LA camp hosted at Lennox Middle School near LAX.

After LA mini-camps are planned across the country as native Sudanese and aid workers make stops in cities across the US (stay tuned for more details on events close to you).

Our goal is to show support for the Sudanese people caught in this crisis and help find solutions for a peaceful resolution. Understanding that this is a global effort we will be encouraging our visitors to not only lobby leaders in the US but to reach out to their other native countries: China, Pakistan, India and others to put pressure on the Sudanese government.

We hope that all Sudanese friends will join us for this month-long campaign of awareness and action.
If you are not in the US you can also show support through the Omidyar Network: www.omidyar.net/group/sudancrisis
Or visit our virtual Camp Darfur in Second Life on Better World Island: www.secondlife.com has the free download

posted in Sudan - 1 reply

no "happily ever after" just yet

acoustichrmny — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 20:11:41 GMT

KHARTOUM, Mar 23 (IPS) - Fifteen African heads of state were in attendance, and thousands of spectators -- witnesses to the signing of a peace deal more than two years in the making, that was ending war between Sudan's government and southern rebels.

"This peace agreement signals the beginning of one Sudan regardless of race, religion or tribe," said John Garang, then head of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army -- now deceased.

Similar words came from Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed el-Bashir. "Today is a glorious day for Sudan and Africa -- a day to alleviate the distress and suffering of our people," he told the crowd at Nyayo stadium in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, in early January, 2005.

"It is a great day, when insecurity will be replaced by security and displacement by homecoming."

More than a year later, has this happened? As separate conflicts in the Western region of Darfur and in eastern Sudan clamour for attention, is it even possible to argue that a promising start has been made in bridging the religious and racial divides between north and south that the peace agreement was intended to address?

In many respects, the signs are less than promising. Consider the tenor of events held to mark the first anniversary of the peace deal, an agreement that resulted in a government of national unity, and which gave the south its own administration -- with the eventual possibility of secession.

Residents of the southern capital of Juba danced, sang and held a celebratory rally where signs saying "South for Southerners Only" and "Northerners go Home" were visible. Perhaps understandably, not one northern representative attended the Juba celebration.

In the north, it was difficult to find any festivities at all.

Abendego Akok, a southerner who heads the Juba University Centre for Peace and Justice Studies in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, said he was disappointed to receive only one invitation to a party, held by the United Nations rather than Sudan's government of national unity.

"When I entered the compound I discovered that most of the participants were southern Sudanese. I didn't see any federal ministers. In the whole city, nothing showed the spirit of celebration," he recounted.

"That is a very serious action," added Akok, normally a genial optimist. "The southern government celebrated the peace agreement alone. It is one of the areas where you can see the differences growing."

Financial hardship and entrenched suspicions seem to be at the root of these differences.

Following the grand buildup to the signing of the peace agreement, southerners clearly expected an improvement in their own lives. Years of fighting have left the south bereft of roads and other infrastructure, while services of all kinds are in short supply -- often non-existent.

Reports indicate that while 4.5 billion dollars in aid was pledged for reconstruction in the south, little money has actually been paid out.

"Tribal leaders say that life in the south is even worse. The tribes have started to fight among themselves to see who can get the best benefit from the CPA (comprehensive peace agreement)," says Edmund Yakani, who heads a community-based organisation that works with displaced southern Sudanese. He has just finished a survey of southern opinions of the peace deal.

Then there is the matter of deep-seated distrust between north and south. Underpinned by religious differences (the north is largely Muslim, the south Christian and animist), and racial tensions between northern Arabs and black southerners, this distrust presents enormous obstacles to implementing the peace agreement in spirit -- as well as fact.

"We have very big suspicions of northerners: we don't trust them. How can you live with someone you don't trust?" asks southern community leader Philip Ungang, this despite having spent half his life in the north -- and being friendly with northerners.

There is also a widespread belief that the peace agreement's provision for Sudanese oil revenues to be shared between north and south is not being adhered to -- with southern Sudan failing to receive its full portion of the funds. This is despite the creation of a body to monitor oil revenues, previously controlled only by government in the north.

One local newspaper recently depicted the shadowy oil sector as a tangled mass of oil pipes bearing question marks that snaked directly into a large purse, carried by a northern, Arab Sudanese.

Perceptions of unfairness -- real or imagined -- cut both ways, however.

"The CPA was not fair to the northerners," argues El Tayib Zain Al Abdeen, a professor of political science at Khartoum University, and secretary general of the Sudan Inter Religious Council.

The fact that the agreement gives southerners a say in national government, even though they have their own, autonomous administration, is a source of particular bitterness.

"Many people feel it's a complete yield to the southerners and to international pressure. Why should the southerners have a share in the judiciary that is ruling the north? They have their own judiciary," says Al Abdeen.

He also has a different view of the cultural divide between north and south.

"If you ask people from southern Sudan, they will not complain about northern Sudanese -- they will complain about government policies. The distrust is against government policies and government decisions, not against common people," he insists.

Certainly, some policies offer much to object about.

"Fundamental freedoms of expression continue to be abused by the national intelligence services or military intelligence," Sami Samar, a United Nations official in Sudan, told reporters in Khartoum recently.

Concerning alleged racism towards black southerners, Justin Ding -- a member of the southern Shilluk royal family -- believe this will wane as Arab and black youngsters attend schools, universities and social events together.

Others are considerably less optimistic, convinced that a black skin is a guarantee only of grueling, low-paid work such as manual labour.

A joke told by Al Abdeen, one of the few northerners who is comfortable discussing race, suggests that racial tensions stem from more than a simple divide between Arabs and blacks, however.

A southerner married an Egyptian woman, he says, and they had several beautiful daughters. When the girls came of age, the southerner's nephews asked to marry them -- only to be told by the southerner: "I am trying to improve the bloodline and the breeding, not worsen it!"

Al Abdeen says both northerners and southerners see humour in this joke. If so, it would mark a rare moment of unity in a nation where economics and culture seem at odds with peace. (END/2006)

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Tell the NY Times not to take Sudanese blood money!

TechGoose — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 20:09:17 GMT

For two years, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has courageously traveled where few other reporters have gone to describe the brutal genocide in Darfur.

Through Kristof's reporting - and that of others at the Times - we have read of the tremendous suffering that has befallen the innocent people of Darfur - at the hands of their very own government.

Yet last Sunday, the New York Times accepted nearly one million dollars from the Sudanese government to run a special eight-page advertising section! The insert, placed in New York-area papers, consisted of pretty words about Sudan's "peaceful, prosperous and democratic future." This propaganda was written on behalf of a government the Times reports has sponsored a mass effort to kill, rape, and force people from their homes.

The New York Times needs to hear from you telling them it was wrong to accept this ad!

Click here now to write a letter to the editor of the New York Times. Demand the Times contribute the ad proceeds to humanitarian relief efforts in Darfur.
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/darfur/pickMedia.jsp?letter_KEY=401

(Please note that the Save Darfur Coalition is not involved in humanitarian relief efforts, and we are not in any way asking for financial support from the Times.)

We encourage free speech and hope the Times continues to report on all perspectives, including those of Sudan's rulers. Since the genocide in Darfur began, the New York Times has spent more time and money reporting the story than any other American news organization.

In fact, on the day the Times ran the Sudanese advertisement, the paper also ran an editorial condemning Sudanese-government-sponsored militias responsible for murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people and displacing millions more.

It is unconscionable that the Times' sales department accepted nearly one million dollars from the murderous Sudanese government to run an advertisement filled with rosy images of an investment haven.

The New York Times is free to choose its business partners and this was a paid advertisement the Times could have chosen to reject! The New York Times should not profit with blood-stained money that would be better spent on health clinics than on advertising. Neither should they turn a profit on the propaganda of those they themselves believe guilty of mass murder.

Click here now to write a letter to the editor of the New York Times and demand they donate the tainted proceeds of the ad to relief work in Darfur!

Thank you,

David Rubenstein
Save Darfur Coalition

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

maryland to divest its holdings in sudan

acoustichrmny — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 16:55:55 GMT

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/annapolis/2006/03/steele_on_sudan.html
---
Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele has called on the managers of the state's pension system to divest its holdings in companies doing business in Sudan.

Steele, who is a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Maryland, said he was "deeply troubled" to learn that the state has about $25 million in funds and accounts that may hold securities invested in companies engaged in business dealings with the government of Sudan.

"The current situation in Sudan can only be described as extremely contrary to U.S. foreign policy and humanitarian objectives," he said, citing episodes of human slavery, mutilations, rape, starvation, and the murder of non-Arab black Africans in Darfur.

Illinois, Oregon and New Jersey, as well as several universities, have begun either divesting funds from Sudan or restricting investments in companies there.

Some Democratic state lawmakers in Maryland have been backing legislation that would impose a similar push for divestment, but said yesterday that the proposal failed last year and is "on life support" as the 2006 session nears its April 10 adjournment.

The bill's sponsor, Del. Salima S. Marriott (D-Baltimore) said yesterday that she believes the issue transcends political partisanship, and appreciated Steele's help lobbying for the bill's passage.

"The situation in Sudan demands this level of collaboration," Marriott said.

Matthew Mosk

posted in Sudan - 2 replies

house passes $50bn aid amendment

acoustichrmny — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 22:44:51 GMT

http://clerk.house.gov/cgi-bin/vote.asp?year=2006&rollnumber=46
---
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d109:9:./temp/~bdL3MR::

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

hrw:new attacks in chad

acoustichrmny — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 20:22:23 GMT

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/02/03/chad12601.htm

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

adrift in egypt

acoustichrmny — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 21:48:21 GMT

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060130/azimi
Adrift in Egypt

by NEGAR AZIMI

[posted online on January 13, 2006]

In the early morning hours of December 30, roughly 4,000 black-clad Egyptian riot police--wearing masks, with batons and shields in hand--descended upon a strip of grass about the size of two tennis courts in a decidedly upscale quarter of Cairo. The unlikely inhabitants of the Mustafa Mahmoud Park, upwards of 3,000 refugees and asylum seekers from neighboring Sudan, were trampled underfoot, beaten, hosed with cold water and finally dragged, often unconscious and sopping wet, onto awaiting buses that would take them to prisons and military detention sites around the city.

The raid and ensuing abuse, not completely out of character for an Egyptian security apparatus accustomed to the excessive use of force, was the climax of a three-month standoff between the assembled Sudanese, a fraction of the estimated 2 to 3 million who make their home in Egypt, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). By January 12 the official death toll was twenty-eight--twelve children among them--though that number will inevitably rise as human rights groups continue to take stock of the city's maze of hospitals and morgues.

For the three months prior to the raid, the demonstrators cum squatters had made for an incongruous site in Mohandiseen--a commercial zone marked by unsightly high-rises, ubiquitous neon and a concrete-jungle air. Their demands were varied, though most centered around a reassessment of their situation in Egypt, given a UNHCR office that they found chronically unsympathetic and a life in a host country that left them firmly situated at the margins. Some had been misled into coming, told that joining the sit-in might mean the chance to get resettled in Canada or America; these demonstrators tended to show up with livelihoods in tow. At one point in November, their numbers swelled to upwards of 5,000, many welcoming the solidarity born of the sit-in. Mohamed Matar, one of the organizers, told me in the days following the raid, "In the garden--whether from north, south, east, west--we were one nation."

Eighteen months earlier, UNHCR had announced that it would suspend hearing individual asylum claims from Sudanese--granting them all "temporary protection" in Egypt instead, marked by a yellow card that affords little beyond the right not to be deported. At the same time, the UN agency announced that it would aid interested Sudanese in repatriation, given Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of January 2005, which ended a bloody decades-long civil war between the north and south.

But for thousands of Sudanese whose cases had nothing to do with the north-south conflict, the CPA's version of peace has no bearing on their asylum claims. For these people, return to Sudan could mean facing detention, warfare (in the case of Darfur in particular) or torture. And this is to say nothing of the fact that the south continues to be unsafe--riddled with land mines and more than occasional fighting, as well as the wanderings of Uganda's rogue Lord's Resistance Army.

So what exactly happened on the morning of December 30, and who is to blame? The Egyptian Ministry of Interior, for its part, was quick to absolve itself of any responsibility--announcing that it had simply responded to UNHCR's request to remove the demonstrators. UNHCR representatives explained that they had put forward their best effort to resolve the standoff, holding more than nine rounds of negotiations with refugee leaders over three months. One last-ditch attempt at negotiation resulted in a signed agreement between the sit-in leaders and the agency on December 17--but it was rejected after the fact by the more intransigent demonstrators who had stayed behind. With the agreement in shambles, the state of affairs within the park seems to have gone from bad to worse, marked by a massive internal feud as well as some dissenters reportedly being tied to a tree to block their departure. And so it began.

In the week following, the reactions to the raid within Egyptian society have been troubling. The official response has been nothing short of defensive, while almost no information has been made available about the names of the dead or the status and locations of the detained. The state television recently cut to shots of Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif visiting injured security police in the hospital, and in the meantime the Egyptian press has been rife with allegations that the Sudanese were in fact drunkards, opportunists and AIDS carriers. The morning after the attack, as orange-clad municipal workers threw the mounds of blankets, English books and the occasional family photograph left over from the sit-in site into dumpsters to be burned, one taxi driver asked me why one should care at all. He echoed the sentiments of many: "Isn't life difficult enough for all of us? Why don't they go back to where they came from?"

Perhaps above all, the demonstration brought attention to the fact that the Sudanese in Egypt continue to live as second-class citizens, suspended in a curious state of benign neglect at the hands of the authorities. While a 1992 ministerial decree guarantees access to education for some foreigners--Sudanese among them--and the Four Freedoms Agreement signed in 2004 between Sudan and Egypt guarantees the right to freedom of movement, residence, work and property, everyday bureaucratic obstacles make such rights practical impossibilities. Most work is carried out informally and is pathetically paid, and accessing medical care is a Herculean task--even for those with official refugee status. Racism abounds. The theft and occasional voluntary sale of body organs among refugees is growing increasingly common.

UNHCR, which has been determining refugee status among the Sudanese in Egypt since 1994, has faced allegations that it is unresponsive to refugee needs, and even occasionally arbitrary in its decision to give refugee status or, alternatively, to close files in Kafkaesque fashion. Once the sit-in began in late September, the agency's office shut down to partial activity--a crude form of punishment. As a result, asylum seekers who had arrived in Egypt since then have not been able to register. Their safety, without any papers to speak of, continues to be precarious.

Beyond isolated voices, little has been forthcoming in terms of public condemnation or calls for moderation in the face of continued racist slurs in the media--particularly from the Egyptian government. To its credit, the banned Muslim Brotherhood was the first political group to speak out against the raid. Likewise, Egypt's Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa has issued a fatwa calling for solidarity with all Sudanese--Muslims and Christians alike.

The Sudanese presence will continue to be a significant one in Egypt for years to come. Considering the ongoing strife in Sudan and increasingly slim slots for resettlement in the West, there ought to be investment in their integration. The Four Freedoms Agreement and its associated privileges must be observed and implemented through a joint effort between the government of Egypt and the UNHCR. Access to schools must be assured for refugee children, while UNHCR should be cautious in its endorsement of repatriation. Here, UNHCR's disastrous forced repatriation of the Rohnigyas of Burma in the 1990s and, more recently, its repatriation of Afghans from Pakistan and Iran to a land that is wrought with instability is worrisome and should serve as a warning. As a party to the Convention Against Torture, Egypt should ensure that no Sudanese nationals are forcibly repatriated to a country in which many would be at risk of torture. As of January 12 UNHCR was still negotiating with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to prevent the deportation of 463 people who remained in detention. And finally, an independent investigation exploring the excessive use of force must ask why an otherwise peaceful demonstration had to come to such a tremendously bloody end.

Just outside the emptied park last week, its dramatic occupation all but a distant memory, a handful of people were out waving placards in solidarity with the deceased. A member of Kifaya, Egypt's modest opposition movement, reminded us that the Egyptian security's brutality was not limited to refugees as targets. In 2004 at least twenty-two people died in Egyptian prisons, while the excessive use of force is the norm at most demonstrations. One placard, particularly prominent, caught my eye. Inscribed in red magic marker, it read in Arabic, "We Are All Sudanese Today."

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sudan year in review

acoustichrmny — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 16:42:20 GMT

SUDAN: Year in Review 2005: Ongoing violence jeopardises a fragile peace
09 Jan 2006 11:17:33 GMT

Source: IRIN

NAIROBI, 9 January (IRIN) - Although hopeful developments marked the beginning of 2005 for Sudan, they gave way to increasing scepticism by the middle of the year, and as violence in Darfur escalated and Ugandan rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) continued to wreak havoc in the south, the good-faith implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) started to look increasingly shaky.

On 9 January, the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) signed the CPA in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, giving hope to many that a corner had finally been turned after a 21-year civil war that claimed 2 million lives.

International donors were united in their support, pledging more than US $4.5 billion to rebuild Sudan during a conference in Oslo, Norway.

The euphoric swearing in of John Garang, chairman of the SPLM/A, as first vice-president on 9 July, with Umar al-Bashir retaining the presidency, further cemented the general sense of optimism.

Garang's sudden death in a tragic helicopter accident on 31 July, however, was followed by three days of violent riots that left 130 people dead around the country. His death shook the nation and brought many unresolved issues and simmering tensions to the fore.

"Garang was the intellectual force behind many of the provisions in the peace deal, and holding the NCP accountable for the implementation of these provisions was much more difficult after his death," said John Prendergast, special adviser to the president of the International Crisis Group (ICG).

Following the riots, the state government decided in August to resume the demolition and relocation of camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) and squatter areas that housed a million people on the outskirts of the capital, Khartoum.

Hundreds of thousands southern Sudanese IDPs, alarmed by the riots and demolitions, began returning to a region with almost nothing in terms of basic services, roads, telecommunications and building infrastructure. Government institutions in the southern capital of Juba were extremely weak, and at the state and county level almost nonexistent.

David Gressly, the United Nations deputy humanitarian coordinator for southern Sudan, estimated that of the four million people displaced from southern Sudan, about half a million returned in 2005 and some 700,000 were expected to return in 2006.

Increasing scepticism

Despite Salva Kiir Mayardit's election to replace Garang, the creation of a government of national unity (GNU) on 20 September, and the establishment of various autonomous government institutions in the south, political analysts expressed concern that Sudan's ruling elite remained reluctant to share power with the former southern rebels as stipulated under the CPA.

In the new GNU, the NCP retained the key ministries of energy and mining, defence, interior, finance and justice.

"In terms of political power and the economic sector, the NCP kept full control over the key ministries, and this is creating a credibility problem," said Alfred Taban, editor of the Khartoum Monitor, an independent newspaper. "The SPLM/A and many southerners were very disappointed and lost faith in the intentions of the NCP."

Other observers in the region believed the NCP was still firmly in charge. Besides retaining key ministries, the party dominated the presidency and its advisory council. The NCP was also able to exert a degree of control over ministries they had handed over to the SPLM/A through shadow bureaucracies comprised of NCP loyalists.

On the military front, continued rumours about Sudanese support for the Ugandan rebels of the LRA and other militias in southern Sudan and the lack of progress in formally agreed troop withdrawals from the southern capital of Juba were other reasons for concern.

"The LRA had spread its operations considerably over the last two to three months, disrupting humanitarian operations in those areas and continuing to be a threat to hopes for development and recovery activities," Gressly noted.

An additional problem was that the composition of the GNU, with the NCP and the SPLM/A together holding 80 percent of the seats, did not incorporate other important groups in the political spectrum, such as the Ummah Party, the Democratic Unionist Party and the Popular National Congress.

"The challenge facing the GNU is to deliver real changes, to transform Sudanese policies towards democracy and human rights and to address poverty and marginalisation," said Hafiz Mohamed, Sudan programme director of Justice Africa, a London-based advocacy group. "But nothing has really changed."

This trend was exacerbated by the fact that following Garang's death the SPLM/A has been relatively passive at the national level, focussing on rebuilding the south instead.

"He was a national, Sudanese politician, not just a southerner," Prendergast said about Garang. "That voice for national interests and the need to prepare for a unified state is missing with his passing."

According to Prendergast, the engagement of the international community was key for the implementation of the CPA. "When their engagement was robust, the parties have responded," he noted, "but it hasn't been consistently robust."

Regional conflicts continue

Essentially an agreement between two warring parties in the south, the CPA failed to address the political and economic marginalisation of eastern Sudan and the western Sudanese region of Darfur. Conflicts continued to fester in these regions.

During the same month the CPA was signed, Sudanese security forces crushed a demonstration of Beja people in the Red Sea town of Port Sudan, killing over 20 people and wounding hundreds. In Darfur, Janjawid militia attacks and aerial bombardments destroyed villages, killing hundreds of civilians.

The international community, encouraged by the signing of the CPA, remained engaged with Sudanese affairs, however, and seemed determined to resolve outstanding conflicts.

In March, the UN Security Council adopted three resolutions on Sudan, deciding to send 10,000 troops to support the country's peace agreement, to impose sanctions on those believed to have committed human rights abuses in Darfur, and to refer the suspected perpetrators of war crimes in this region to the International Criminal Court.

As a result of concerted action by the international community, Darfur experienced a period of relative stability, and mortality rates fell below the threshold that defines a humanitarian emergency. Progress was made on the political front, and the Sudanese government and two main rebel groups in Darfur signed a Declaration of Principles on 19 July.

Escalating violence in Darfur

In September 2005, however, violence increased significantly in Darfur, prompting the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) to warn that banditry and continuous attacks by armed groups on humanitarian workers, Arab nomads and villages threatened to destabilise the fragile ceasefire.

Three Nigerian peacekeepers and two contractors were killed after armed men opened fire on them in October. It was the first time the African Union suffered fatalities in the region.

Meanwhile, progress in the peace negotiations was undermined by tension within Darfur's main rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A), as well as between the SLM/A and the other main rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).

The divisions within the SLM/A were partly personal, between the ethnically based factions led by SLM/A Chairman Abdel Wahid Mohammed al-Nur, a member of the Fur community, and its secretary-general, Mini Arko Minawi, a Zaghawa.

There were also divisions between the field commanders and the political leadership, leading to a degree of warlordism on the ground.

In November, violence escalated further, and another 15,000 newly displaced people sought refuge in Gereida town following fighting that affected 26 villages. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported that all the villages had emptied and hundreds of people were killed.

In December, Human Rights Watch published a report containing a list of senior Sudanese officials, including President Umar al-Bashir, who it said should be investigated for crimes against humanity in Darfur and placed on a UN sanctions list.

The looting and destruction of villages was not only condoned by government officials, the report said, it was also methodically organised, with troops and militia members permitted to take land, livestock and other civilian property after killing, raping and torturing tens of thousands of people.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned on 29 December that the security situation in Darfur continued to deteriorate, leading to nearly a doubling of confirmed civilian deaths from violence. He called the ongoing militia attacks a "shocking indication" of the government's continuing failure to protect its own population.

"The vast majority of armed militia have not been disarmed, and no major steps have been taken by the government to bring to justice or even identify any of the militia leaders or the perpetrators of attacks, contributing to a prevailing climate of impunity," Annan noted.

By then, nearly 3 million people - half the Darfur population - were receiving food aid from humanitarian workers, who faced increasingly high levels of insecurity. Those Darfurians most exposed to violence and gross violations of human rights, however, continued to live in fear and terror.

Also, as a result of the souring of relations between Sudan and neighbouring Chad, observers warned that the Darfur conflict had the potential to destabilise Chad, following various cross-border incursions.

"The international response, just like in Rwanda in 1994, focuses on the interethnic aspect of the killing, rather than the planners and the perpetrators," Prendergast observed. "So the concern is that the increasing attacks and small-scale battles and reduced access for relief agencies will lead to the resumption of full-scale civil war among a number of parties in Darfur."

Eastern Sudan

In its latest report, "Sudan: Saving the Peace in the East", the ICG warned that if the SPLM/A proceeded with its scheduled troop withdrawal from eastern Sudan, the low-intensity conflict between the Sudanese government and the rebel Eastern Front (EF) risked becoming a major new war with disastrous humanitarian consequences.

The EF was established in February 2005 between the rebels of the Beja Congress, an ethnically based group from the Red Sea Hills, and the Free Lions, backed by the Rashaida community from the eastern plains. The movement has links with the SPLM/A, and the JEM, as well as support from Eritrea.

Due in part to the eastern region's economic and strategic significance, as well as military activity since the mid-1990s, the government has a heavy security presence involving - according to the ICG - three times as many forces as in Darfur.

Under the CPA, the SPLM/A is obligated to remove its troops from eastern Sudan by 9 January 2006, and this - as well as the possibility of JEM activity in the east - has increased the likelihood that Khartoum will move militarily against the EF.

"Given that SPLM/A was much more implicated in the [war in the] east than it was in Darfur, a new conflict there has the potential to unravel the CPA and draw the SPLM/A back into the conflict," warned David Mozersky, senior Sudan analyst for the ICG. He stressed that the establishment of a credible forum for negotiations was key to Sudan's stability.

Conclusion

In short, although a historic peace agreement was signed and considerable progress has been made in setting up transitional government institutions, the ruling NCP seems reluctant to genuinely share power. At the same time, poor security in Darfur, the east and the south appears to persist, with negative consequences for the CPA. The conflict in Darfur, in particular, has the potential to destabilise the region and spill over into Chad.

At the same time, it is remarkable that peace, after decades of brutal civil war in the south, has held.

More coordinated and continued pressure by the international community, as well as support, seems to be imperative to consolidate a sustainable peace in Sudan, as acknowledged by a major donor who requested to remain anonymous.

"We are still not forceful enough. We are too soft and we don't attach enough conditions to our assistance. I don't see any progress with regard to objecting against and trying to reduce the demolitions and forced displacements around Khartoum, the lack of cooperation with the ICC or the continued aggression in Darfur and lack of good faith towards reaching solutions there," he said.

"The UN, too, should be an independent forceful political force in Sudan," the donor added. "The UN shouldn't be a play-ball of political forces in Sudan, who might not have the people's needs in mind. The UN should be the custodian of people's needs."

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stop deportation of sudanese demonstrators

acoustichrmny — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:38:20 GMT

Egypt: Stop Deportation of Sudanese Demonstrators
Survivors of Police Raid Face Forced Return
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/01/04/egypt12366_txt.htm
(Washington, D.C., January 4, 2006) – Egyptian President Husni Mubarak should prevent the threatened deportation of hundreds of Sudanese demonstrators arrested following the December 30 police attack on their encampment in Cairo, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch again called for an independent commission to investigate responsibility for the violence in the incident in which at least 27 persons, including children, died.
In a letter to President Mubarak, Human Rights Watch today expressed concern that some of the 645 persons slated for return could be at risk of persecution in Sudan, and that the police assault had scattered families, resulting in the separation of children from their parents. International law prohibits the return of refugees to places where they face persecution and obliges states to ensure that children not be separated from their families.

“It’s clear that the brutal tactics of the security forces left families separated and vital documents such as refugee cards destroyed or missing,” said Bill Frelick, refugee policy director for Human Rights Watch.

The makeshift camp of some 3,000 Sudanese refugees and migrants had been the site of a three-month protest regarding a variety of grievances with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, living conditions in Egypt, and lack of lasting solutions to their plight. In the early hours of December 30, approximately 4,000 Egyptian police surrounded the camp and, after warning the demonstrators by loudspeaker to leave, fired water cannons into the crowd and then entered in force, beating protesters indiscriminately.

Human Rights Watch later that day called for an independent investigation to determine responsibility for ordering and carrying out the police attack.

President Mubarak subsequently said that the attorney general would look into the incident, but government officials have consistently blamed the demonstrators for provoking the violence and directly or indirectly causing the deaths and injuries. In its letter to President Mubarak, Human Rights Watch said that an independent commission was needed in order to probe responsibility of high government officials, including Interior Minister Habib al-`Adli, for ordering and directing the attack.

“Previous government inquiries into police violence against Egyptian protestors have consistently exonerated Interior Ministry officials,” Frelick said. “In this case the precipitous return of hundreds of victims and witnesses would make any investigation into the violence of December 30 an empty gesture.”

To read Human Rights Watch’s letter to President Mubarak, please visit:
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/01/04/egypt12364.htm

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National Call-in Day for Darfur - Dec 6

TechGoose — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 06:03:34 GMT

Pasted from the Save Darfur dot org eMail bulletin:

National Call-In Day for Darfur

Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005

After the success of our last National Call-In Day for Darfur, we hope that you will join us in picking up the phone once again this Tuesday, December 6.

Experts from the State Department, NATO, and leading think-tanks have repeatedly said that funding the African Union is absolutely critical to stopping what both the President and Congress have declared to be genocide. Unfortunately, $50 million intended for African Union troops in Darfur was cut out of the recent Foreign Operations spending bill. There is, however, one last chance to get that funding back before the end of the year. An effort is underway to include those funds in the Defense Appropriations Conference Report when Congress comes back into session next week. It is vital that we do everything we can to make sure that Congress knows that their constituents are paying attention to this bill, and that we expect them to include these funds. Please call your Representative and your two Senators and make your voice heard on this incredibly important issue.

A sample call script is below, and you can find contact information for your elected leaders’ Washington, DC office by clicking here, or by calling the Capitol operator at (202) 224-3121 and simply asking to be connected to your Representative and Senators. Please forward this along to any friends, family, or coworkers who you think may be interested, and again, thank you for taking the time to pick up the phone and help the people of Darfur.

Sample call script:

Hi, this is ___ calling from ___. I’m calling to urge Congressman/woman/Senator ___ to do everything he/she can to make sure that $50 million for African Union peacekeeping troops in Darfur is included in the Defense Appropriations conference report. Experts from the State Department, NATO, and leading think-tanks have repeatedly said that funding the African Union is critical to stopping what both the President and Congress have declared to be genocide. Please tell the Congressman/woman/Senator know that his/her constituents care about Darfur and expect Congress to fund the peacekeepers. Thank you.

Contact information:
- To subscribe, enter your email address under "get email updates" at www.SaveDarfur.org.
- To unsubscribe, please reply with "unsubscribe" in the subject line.
- For other correspondence, please write to info@savedarfur.org.
- Please visit us at www.SaveDarfur.org

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

aids in sudan

acoustichrmny — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 19:48:15 GMT

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article330459.ece
---
HIV/Aids has penetrated southern Sudan, the last untouched pocket of Africa, threatening an isolated and uninformed people with disaster, health experts warned yesterday, the eve of World Aids Day.

Sudan's 22-year civil war displaced more than four million people - the highest number of internally displaced people in the world - but it also guarded the region against the spread of Aids. That isolation is over and the impoverished inhabitants face a new and previously unknown killer. Charles Lumori, programme director with HelpAge International, in the regional capital, Juba, said: "The spread of HIV in southern Sudan has been held back by the war. We know that it hasn't yet reached many areas but this innocence will soon be lost."

Conflict has left southern Sudan particularly vulnerable to HIV - a virus that experts say has infected more than 40 million people in more than 90 countries - including about 25 million people in Africa.

The rapid increase in traffic of military personnel, commercial transporters, sex workers, and influx of international workers is putting the whole of southern Sudan at risk.

According to government figures, HIV/Aids has infected only 2.6 per cent of people in the whole of Sudan. But Dr Patrick Abok from the World Health Programme, said the region was under threat from all sides now that peace had reconnected it to its neighbours.

"Southern Sudan is surrounded by countries with very high prevalence rates. - Kenya, Ethiopia, DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] and Uganda," he said. "There are thousands of Sudanese refugees living in these countries that are starting to return home and research is proving that there is a very high prevalence rate in the border regions."

In Juba's only HIV testing centre, the Voluntary Counselling and Testing centre, many of the first victims of the coming epidemic are not even aware what they have caught. "I have never heard of Aids - what is it?" asked one of the young soldiers. "I have come to the VCT because I was referred here by the hospital. I came here from the north of Sudan with the government soldiers. People in the army do have sex a lot with local girls and other girls too. But the army has never told us about these things condoms."

Local cultural practices such as tattooing and polygamy are compounding the problem. Access to basic social services in southern Sudan is among the lowest in the world, with adult literacy 24 per cent and one doctor for every 100,000 people. Lack of health care and skilled health workers makes treatment of people living with HIV/Aids virtually impossible.

Regina Wayet, a traditional birth attendant in Merikyo, a town 30 miles west of Juba, said that prior to the arrival of HelpAge this year, no one had heard of Aids. "There are now a lot of new people coming to this town. For nearly 10 years we were cut off from anybody but with people moving around and soldiers coming home I am very worried they will bring this disease with them."

She said local men traditionally had three wives, to whom they were faithful. But new arrivals were eroding the custom. "There are no condoms here so we have to teach people to be abstinent or faithful - this is the only protection we have against this disease," she said.

The absence of a comprehensive education system is making educating young people about the dangers of the disease extremely difficult. Just one in eight children currently attends school and normally only up until the age of 11. HelpAge International is one of the few international NGOs working in Juba and the surrounding areas. Continuing insecurity, despite the peace agreement and logistical constraints, have limited the arrival of other organisations. Its programmes focus on educating older people about the dangers of HIV and encouraging them to spread the message to their communities, where they hold respect.

The fate of Kusana Sawan, who was in her forties with five children when she fell ill, illustrates the scale of the task facing health workers. After contracting TB - the most common consequence of becoming HIV-positive - she was ostracised from her community.

"Everyone in my community was very suspicious of me because I was very sick and nobody wanted to help me. They thought I maybe had developed this disease called Aids," she said. "My husband just wants me dead because my illness is a shame to him and he has already bought me a coffin for when I die."

Ms Sawan died last week. Left untreated in a filthy ward, she had wanted to be tested for the sake of her family but was forbidden. The stigma attached to terminal illness and suspected HIV infection means that neither hospital staff nor families want to admit the existence of Aids.

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a tolerable genocide

acoustichrmny — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:49:45 GMT

A Tolerable Genocide
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/112705C.shtml
Sunday 27 November 2005

Nyala, Sudan - Who would have thought that a genocide could become worse? But after two years of heartbreaking slaughter, rape and mayhem, the situation in Darfur is now spiraling downward.

More villages are again being attacked and burned - over the last week thatch-roof huts have been burning near the town of Gereida and far to the northwest near Jebel Mun.

Aid workers have been stripped, beaten and robbed. A few more attacks on aid workers, and agencies may pull out - leaving the hapless people of Darfur with no buffer between themselves and the butchers.

The international community has delegated security to the African Union, but its 7,000 troops can't even defend themselves, let alone protect civilians. One group of 18 peacekeepers was kidnapped last month, and then 20 soldiers sent to rescue them were kidnapped as well; four other soldiers and two contractors were killed in a separate incident.

What will happen if the situation continues to deteriorate sharply and aid groups pull out? The U.N. has estimated that the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.

The turmoil has also infected neighboring Chad, which is inhabited by some of the same tribes as Sudan. Diplomats and U.N. officials are increasingly worried that Chad could tumble back into its own horrific civil war as well.

This downward spiral has happened because for more than two years, the international community has treated this as a tolerable genocide. In my next column, my last from Darfur, I'll outline the steps we need to take. But the essential starting point is outrage: a recognition that countering genocide must be a global priority.

It's true that a few hundred thousand deaths in Darfur - a good guess of the toll so far - might not amount to much in a world where two million a year die of malaria. But there is something special about genocide. When humans deliberately wipe out others because of their tribe or skin color, when babies succumb not to diarrhea but to bayonets and bonfires, that is not just one more tragedy. It is a monstrosity that demands a response from other humans. We demean our own humanity, and that of the victims, when we avert our eyes.

Already, large swaths of Darfur are so unsafe that they are "no go" areas for humanitarian organizations - meaning that we don't know what horrors are occurring in those areas. But we have some clues.

There are widespread reports that the janjaweed, the government-backed Arab marauders who have been slaughtering members of several African tribes, sometimes find it convenient not to kill or expel every last African but to leave a few alive to grow vegetables and run markets. So they let some live in exchange for protection money or slave labor.

One Western aid worker in Darfur told me that she had visited an area controlled by janjaweed. In public, everyone insisted - meekly and fearfully - that everything was fine.

Then she spoke privately to two sisters, both of the Fur tribe. They said that the local Fur were being enslaved by the janjaweed, forced to work in the fields and even to pay protection money every month just to be allowed to live. The two sisters said that they were forced to cook for the janjaweed troops and to accept being raped by them.

Finally, they said, their terrified father had summoned the courage to beg the janjaweed commander to let his daughters go. That's when the commander beheaded the father in front of his daughters.

"They told me they just wanted to die," the aid worker remembered in frustration. "They're living like slaves, in complete and utter fear. And we can't do anything about it."

That aid worker has found her own voice, by starting a blog called "Sleepless in Sudan" in which she describes what she sees around her. It sears at http://sleeplessinsudan.blogspot.com, without the self-censorship that aid groups routinely accept as the price for being permitted to save lives in Darfur.

Our leaders still haven't found their voices, though. Congress has even facilitated the genocide by lately cutting all funds for the African Union peacekeepers in Darfur; we urgently need to persuade Congress to restore that money.

So what will it take? Will President Bush and other leaders discover some backbone if the killing spreads to Chad and the death toll reaches 500,000? One million? God forbid, two million?

How much genocide is too much?

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darfur peace and accountability acts passes

acoustichrmny — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 20:00:20 GMT

We are very pleased to announce that last Friday, November 18, the Senate passed the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act (S. 1462).

The act calls on the United States and the international community to:

Provide assistance and reinforcements to the African Union Mission in Sudan and call for NATO to do the same

Deny the Sudanese government access to oil profits and prevent Sudanese oil tankers from docking in U.S. ports

Deny Visas to and block assets of anyone involved in the Darfur genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Sudan

Prohibit U.S. assistance to countries that are providing military support to the Sudanese government

Click here to read the full text of the Act (PDF).
http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M712483431601955921383765

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sudan falters as us house rethinks aid

acoustichrmny — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 21:12:19 GMT

from the November 14, 2005 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1114/p02s02-usfp.html
By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - A year ago, the House of Representatives passed a resolution inviting the United States to call the violence in Sudan's Darfur region "by its rightful name: genocide."

President Bush complied, and international action was taken to stop militia violence against Darfur's black African minority, including deployment of an African Union peacekeeping force.

But earlier this month a House committee - in a budget-cutting mode and amid what Darfur experts say is a mistaken sense that violence in the traumatized region has been quelled - voted to trim the $50 million that lawmakers had approved earlier in the year for the African Union force.

Some experts haven't minced words. "Congress should be ashamed of itself," says Jonathan Morganstein, a Marine reserve officer with peacekeeping experience who co-wrote a new report on Darfur by Refugees International. Citing the now-famous case of pork-barrel funding for "bridges to nowhere" in recent transportation appropriations, he adds, "For less than 15 percent of [the bridges' cost] we can help stave off this genocide."

The Refugees International report finds after recent on-the-ground investigations that the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) is losing control because of a weak mandate, poor equipment, and woefully inadequate troop numbers. And it's facing increased attacks itself. The report concludes that the situation for Darfur's uprooted and besieged population is deteriorating once again.

AMIS "is failing," says Sally Chin, the report's coauthor. Donors like the US are neglecting their pledges to fund and provision the force, she says, and as a result, humanitarian groups are being forced to abandon their work for security reasons.

"The situation is getting much worse," says Ms. Chin. She notes that displacements are rising again - one-third of the population of 6 million is already uprooted - and that whole sections of the population are cut off from international aid and surveillance. This is especially true since AMIS has not reached its intended level of 12,500 troops.

The situation did appear to improve early in the summer, Mr. Morganstein says, which may explain why international attention has trailed off - including from the US Congress.

Last year's congressional action was taken after Darfur became a featured cause of conservative Christian groups concerned about "persecution" of one of Africa's largest Christian minority populations. Human rights activist Elie Wiesel called Darfur "the world capital of suffering."

The Refugees International report says more pressure and action are needed by both the US and the United Nations.

Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick was in Nairobi, Kenya, last week to convene talks among Darfur antigovernment rebels. But the result was more a picture of the level of discord among feuding factions than a move toward unity against the government in Khartoum.

Peace talks on the Darfur conflict are supposed to resume in Nigeria next Sunday, but the infighting among rebel groups does not bode well for the negotiations, US officials say.

The poor prospects for peace make measures to safeguard the Darfur population only more urgent, humanitarian aid groups say.

According to Morganstein, AMIS is trying to accomplish what UN peacekeeping missions did in Bosnia and Kosovo - only with fewer soldiers protecting a larger population over a much larger territory. AMIS currently has fewer than 5,000 soldiers to cover an area the size of Texas.

"No one would seriously suggest that 5,000 police officers could maintain security in Texas," Morganstein says - not to mention, he adds, that Darfur is living under an uneasy cease-fire.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

your help please....

fluff-goddess — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 18:04:49 GMT

Hello, I've just found this tribe....thank you for creating this tribe and I'm so thankful I found it!!!!

I would like some help, I'm working on catching up on the posts as there is a lot of amazing information on this tribe....

My baby shower is coming up and I'm setting up a table to raise money for the children/people of Sudan, I've also hired African dancers and drummers to not only entertain but to educate---my mother was not thrilled of my plans as she wanted to throw a typical traditional shower but I put my foot down as this is so very important to me--she is coming around now though....I've learned quite a bit from my dance instructor who is from the Ivory Coast but I wanted to get some additional feedback as far as donations/fund raisers/organizations....and where better to get that info than from a tribe like this?!?!?

Now I've contributed a little here and there but feel that my baby shower could gather more money than I could ever donate with my own finances.....

Any advice as to a fund raiser or organization that I could look into to send the donation to??

I usually send to World Vision but I'm sure there must be a more productive organization....

Any advice would be super helpful and much appreciated....

~Thank you all for any and all input~

posted in Sudan - 2 replies

oil sector proves hard nut to crack

acoustichrmny — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 19:26:12 GMT

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=30703
---
KHARTOUM, Oct 20 (IPS) - For geological engineer Farouq Kam, Sudan's 21-year civil war didn't really end in January when the country's Islamist government signed a peace agreement with rebels from the Christian and animist south. It just took on a more subtle hue.

"The war is not over...It is not necessarily going to be fought in the bush of southern Sudan anymore. But another war has just started, with other tools. And that is the war of tricks," he told IPS. At the heart of this conflict, lie Sudan's coveted oil resources.

January's peace deal stipulates that oil wealth is to be shared by government officials and former rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) from the south. This area will now enjoy autonomy under the guidance of a regional government; the rebels also form part of a national transitional government.

However, control of the key Ministry of Energy and Mining, which deals with oil production and revenue, was awarded to President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir's National Congress Party (NCP). This decision outraged many in southern Sudan, where most of the oil resources are located; they saw the move as a precursor to being denied their share of oil revenue.

Kam, who hails from the southern, oil-producing state of Bentiu, is a member of the Nuer ethnic group -- which issued a press statement recently to publicise concerns about the division of oil income. Under the peace accord, regional government in the south will receive 50 percent of oil revenue, the central government 48 percent -- and oil-producing areas the remaining two percent.

Some claim that the decision to yield over control of the energy ministry was motivated by SPLM leader and newly-appointed vice-president Salva Kiir Mayardit's desire to get the interim government up-and-running. The administration was inaugurated towards the end of last month, after delays sparked by disagreements over which group should manage critical ministries such as the energy portfolio.

"It's really a show of good faith," says Abendego Akok, head of the Juba University Centre of Peace and Justice Studies, located in the capital -- Khartoum. "The government was formed. We are now looking forward."

But even the most optimistic concede that the secrecy surrounding the oil industry is problematic. Figures on oil production are not disclosed.

"It's not transparent, so they do what they want. They don’t do what the people want," claims Edriss Yousif Ahmad, a former member of parliament who is currently vice president of a group of activists in the strife-torn province of Darfur -- in western Sudan.

Akok agrees.

"No academic in the Sudan will tell you that he has read something about oil, oil revenue, how the contracts are signed, where it is sold," he told IPS. "We are unaware of all the structures of the oil ministry. If you deceive yourself that you know, that is a big lie."

Kam alleges that south Sudanese may also find other aspects of the oil sector hard to grasp, as they have been locked out of the industry.

"We have never been represented as far as the oil companies are concerned. We don’t have people in the manpower (labour force). Our people are not allowed to work, even as manual labour -- leave away the qualified (personnel)," he says.

Adds Akok, "Most of the oil fields are in the war-affected areas, so they were under the Sudanese army. So the access to the oil fields is not so easy because they are considered to be military...areas."

Sudan’s peace agreement provides for the formation of bipartisan commissions which will act as watchdogs to prevent corruption in government.

But such commissions cannot be established until the formation of a regional authority in the south is complete. Furthermore, commission members will not be elected but appointed, by Mayardit and al-Bashir. The undemocratic nature of this process has cast doubt on whether the commissions will be seen as legitimate.

In Ahmad's view, the development of strong regional authorities offers the best hope of ensuring fair play within the oil industry.

"We have to make strong regional governments against a weak central government," he told IPS. "Now we have a strong central government and weak regional governments. It's a problem."

The situation is made all the more fraught by the fact that after the six year interim period has elapsed, southern Sudanese will vote on whether they want to remain united with northern Sudan -- or secede to form their own nation, a move that would decisively place southern oil resources beyond the reach of Khartoum.

Sudan’s new government faces many additional challenges. Southern militias which were not aligned with the SPLM still roam the region, while in Darfur, government stands accused of committing humanitarian violations against its own people and supporting brutal militias to crush dissent. An estimated 200,000 lives have been lost in the Darfur conflict.

More than two million died during the war in the south, which embarked on civil conflict to prevent religious domination by the Muslim north, as well as ethnic and economic marginalisation. (END/2005)

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

chaos grows in darfur

acoustichrmny — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 18:30:23 GMT

Chaos Grows in Darfur Conflict as Militias Turn on Government
By Marc Lacey
The New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101805O.shtml
Tuesday 18 October 2005

Zam Zam, Sudan - The outlaws who rode into Geneina on camelback one recent afternoon represent the latest grim chapter in the desert war in western Sudan.

Janjaweed militias have focused their wrath on innocent villagers for most of the two and a half years of the conflict in the Darfur region. But on Sept. 18, in a scene that aid workers described as something out of a Hollywood western, the militiamen surrounded the police station along Sudan's border with Chad, roughed up the chief and freed several of their members from jail.

The fact that militias trained and armed by the government are now emboldened enough to turn their guns on the government is a sign of trouble. It was government support of the janjaweed at the outset that ignited the fighting in Darfur that killed tens of thousands of people and displaced two million villagers.

The standoff in Geneina, which together with other incidents prompted the United Nations to evacuate many of its personnel, is part of an overall deterioration in Darfur. The conflict has grown even more confused and chaotic in recent months. Now, rebels fight other rebels, the ties between some janjaweed fighters and the government have frayed, and the African Union troops charged with quelling the conflict find themselves targets as well.

"Darfur is no longer under control," said Eltayeb Hag Ateya, head of the Peace Studies Institute at the University of Khartoum. "It's not just the government against the rebels anymore. There's this armed group and that armed group. It's getting more complicated by the day."

The war here was never a straightforward one. It was part Arab versus African, part government versus rebel, part nomad versus farmer. But two rebel forces have now grown to five or more, with some fighters from neighboring Chad adding to what one aid worker in Darfur called "a cocktail of armed actors."

Some janjaweed fighters have put on government uniforms. Others maraud through the countryside taking orders from no one. With peace talks at a critical stage, the number of fighting forces jockeying for power seems to grow by the day.

Zam Zam, a former village in northern Darfur that has been transformed into a sprawling camp of people on the run from war, is one place that illustrates the new Darfur.

Things in Darfur can be deceptively calm at times - until hundreds of men on camelback come loping through the sand with their guns blazing. Or until rebels leap out from their cover in a surprise attack on government troops. Or until a government aircraft swoops in low.

Darfur's war began when two rebel groups opened attacks on the government in early 2003, accusing it of ignoring African tribes of Darfur. The Islamist government struck back, enlisting the aid of Darfur's Arab tribes. The militias destroyed hundreds of villages throughout Darfur, raping and pillaging as they sought to root out rebels and punish sympathizers.

Zam Zam, created in 2003, grew into one of Darfur's largest camps for internally displaced people. It has always been an insecure place, situated strategically near government and rebel strongholds. But something happened earlier this year that gave aid workers hope that Darfur might be changing for the better.

The population of the camp, which has crept higher and higher since the fighting started, finally began to drop. In May and June, hundreds and then thousands of people in Zam Zam and other camps around Darfur began returning home to cultivate their crops, a sign that normal life was returning to this desperate place.

But the hopeful signs did not last long. Just last month, after the villagers had hoed their plots and planted their vegetables and groundnuts and other crops, the militias attacked again.

"They came with cars, with horses and with camels," said Ali Mohamed Fadu, a sheik from Jabein, a village that was overrun on Sept. 17 for the second time in two years. "They all had guns, and they shot at us and killed some of us."

The accounts offered by villagers are remarkably similar to the ones heard at the start of the conflict, when people across Darfur were terrorized in attacks that the United States government said amounted to genocide.

With villagers on the run again, the population of Zam Zam is back on the rise, with thousands of new arrivals in the past three weeks.

Ismail Abduraman, 25, lost his father, who was a shopkeeper, in the recent attacks. After robbing him and shooting him, the militiamen looted his shop. In all the confusion, Mr. Abduraman became separated from 17 of his brothers and sisters.

While most people in Darfur contend that the countryside is far too dangerous for them these days, Mr. Abduraman is planning to return in search of his missing family members. He plans to take a donkey along and walk seven hours to the west, across the scorching sand.

"I have to go," he said. "I can't just sit here when my family is out there. My father would go, but he can't. I'm the elder now."

Farther east, in Tawila, the situation is similarly grim. African villagers congregate on the south side of the main road together with some fighters from the Sudan Liberation Army, the main rebel movement in Darfur. To the north is a police station where many of the officers are former militia fighters.

It is an explosive mix that has led to a series of shooting incidents in recent weeks. Terrified people from the area now huddle next to the African Union camp overlooking the town.

But the African soldiers are hamstrung by their rules of engagement, their lack of equipment and their inexperience in the field. When the police recently raided Tawila, shooting at suspected rebels and burning structures in the market, African Union soldiers watched from their hilltop perch but did not intervene.

It is impossible for them, however, to remain entirely on the sidelines. An African Union convoy was ambushed on Oct. 8 in the Khorabashi area in South Darfur. During an exchange of fire, four Nigerian soldiers and two civilian contractors were killed.

A day later, a renegade group of rebels abducted 38 African Union soldiers in the border town of Tine, warning the African Union not to tread in its territory. The soldiers were rescued after a battle between rival factions of the Justice and Equality Movement, which is one of the rebel groups opposed to the Sudanese government in Darfur.

Baba Gana Kingibe, the African Union's special representative in Sudan, said recently that there was "neither good faith nor commitment on the part of any of the parties."

Perhaps the most horrifying incident in the new Darfur occurred along the Chadian border at the Aro Sharow camp. On Sept. 28, several hundred janjaweed fighters raided the camp, killing 35 people and wounding 10 more. Most attacks occur for a reason here, and this one is believed to be tied to the killing of a janjaweed leader's children days before or, in another version, the theft of hundreds of camels from Arab tribesmen by rebel fighters.

If there is a hopeful sign in Darfur, it is this: Violence typically spikes in such conflicts when peace talks reach a critical phase. The negotiations in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, are in their sixth round, bogged down but not broken. The recent brutalities are seen as efforts by various fighting forces in Darfur to win a seat at the table or at least get access to some of the spoils.

But with the reality on the ground so grim, the traumatized people of Darfur seem to be growing almost numb. As Mr. Abduraman set off from the relative safety of the Zam Zam camp to the lawless interior, he had no weapon, little food and no real plan. He said he left his fate to God. "If the janjaweed find me, they will kill me," he said matter-of-factly as he crouched in the sand. "I will join my father."

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

us blocks un briefing

acoustichrmny — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 04:57:57 GMT

Published on Tuesday, October 11, 2005 by Reuters
US Blocks U.N. Briefing on Atrocities in Sudan
by Irwin Arieff
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1011-04.htm
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton blocked a U.N. envoy on Monday from briefing the Security Council on grave human rights violations in Sudan's Darfur region, saying the council had to act against atrocities and not just talk about them.

Bolton, joined by China, Algeria and Russia, prevented Juan Mendez, Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special adviser for the prevention of genocide, from briefing the council on his recent visit to Darfur, despite pleas from Annan and 11 other council members that Mendez be heard.

"I strongly regret and deplore that Mr. Mendez ... was not authorized to brief the council today as Mr. Kofi Annan had asked," French Ambassador Jean-Marc de la Sabliere told reporters outside the council chambers.

But Bolton said he had objected to the briefing to make the point the council should be "talking more about the steps it can take to do something about the deteriorating security situation" in Darfur. He gave no new proposals.

"How many officials from the secretariat does it take to give a briefing?" he said, noting the council had just concluded a briefing on Darfur from Hedi Annabi, the assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping operations.

Mendez, who visited Darfur for a week in late September, later briefed reporters on his findings. He said Sudanese officials were taking only cosmetic steps to prevent systematic human rights abuses there that might amount to genocide. crimes against humanity or war crimes.

He also accused Khartoum of refusing to cooperate with the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, a tribunal strongly opposed by the Bush administration on grounds it might pursue frivolous prosecutions of U.S. soldiers or officials working abroad.

INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE

"We cannot let the government of Sudan get away with that," Mendez told a news conference. "I haven't seen any indication of the international community telling Sudan, 'You don't have a choice, you have to cooperate with the ICC."'

Mendez said the Security Council had to put more pressure on the Sudanese to disarm nomad Arab gangs, known as Janjaweed, responsible for many of the atrocities now escalating in camps housing African tribesmen thrown off their land. So far Sudanese trials of any perpetrators were meaningless, he said.

Secondly, Mendez recommended that the international community make good on its pledges to give aid to the Africa Union, which has monitors and troops in Darfur.

Council diplomats who wanted to hear from Mendez said it was a council tradition to give the envoy a platform when Annan called for a briefing from his adviser on genocide.

They noted Bolton had lined up with the three council members -- Algeria, China and Russia -- which have watered down action against Khartoum.

"He's playing into the hands of people who don't want to do anything," said one council diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to irritate Washington.

The Security Council met for a briefing on the latest developments in Darfur after rebels in the western Sudanese region abducted a number of African Union peacekeeping troops and killed some of them.

The incident prompted Annan to warn in Geneva on Monday that a surge of violence in the region may force the world body to suspend some aid to Darfur.

Additional reporting by Evelyn Leopold

Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

refugees burned alive as violence returns

acoustichrmny — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 17:18:09 GMT

Refugees burned alive as violence returns to Darfur
By Meera Selva, Africa Correspondent
---
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article316086.ece
---
Published: 30 September 2005
Darfur is in the grip of a fresh outbreak of violence, with hundreds of civilians being killed by warring militias and the United Nations mission considering pulling out of the region.

At least 29 people were reported killed yesterday in an "unprecedented" attack on the Aro Sharow refugee camp in the northwestern area of Sudan. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said people in the camp and local villagers had been attacked by 300 "armed Arab men on horses and camels".

Over the past two months thousands of civilians have fled their villages across Darfur. At least 5,000 people have been driven to shelter in camps, saying their villages had been attacked by the pro-government militias known as the janjaweed. Hundreds more are reported to have been killed. The Sudanese government had promised to clamp down on militias operating in the region earlier this year, but both the rebel Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the janjaweed have stepped up attacks on civilians, aid workers and each other.

On Wednesday, the UN's under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, warned that the situation in Darfur was becoming so violent that the UN and other aid agencies may have to pull out. He said: "As we speak, we have had to suspend action in many areas. Tens of thousands of people will not get any assistance today because it is too dangerous and it could grow."

Since the beginning of August, more than 45 aid convoys have been attacked on roads leading to the main camps by militias who have beaten up drivers and stolen food from the vehicles. Aid agencies have now stopped using main roads, and are relying on a few helicopters to get supplies to displaced people. Local staff working at many of the camps have not had their salaries paid for months.

Nicki Bennett, based in Nyala for Oxfam, said: "The security situation in Darfur remains extremely volatile - people still face the threat of horrific violence on a daily basis, and insecurity is also hampering humanitarian access ... The African Union peacekeeping troops are helping to improve the situation in the areas where they are deployed, but there are not nearly enough of them. At the moment, there are not even 6,000 troops trying to patrol a region the size of France."

The humanitarian situation has been worsened by rains, which have flooded many of the camps. Medical workers say outbreaks of malaria and diarrhoea are increasing, but they are not able to get medicines to the worst affected areas. A fuel shortage is also hindering the delivery of food and medicines.

All sides have also intensified military operations. Last week, the SLA launched a surprise attack to gain control of the southern Darfur town of Sheiria, and on Monday, the janjaweed, in uniform and on horseback, crossed the border and killed 36 people in Chad. The Chad army, which claims to have killed seven of the attackers, said the janjaweed crossed the border to steal livestock.

Peace talks between the Sudanese government and the SLA resumed in Nigeria this week, but the AU has complained that the SLA is destabilising the talks by continuing to fight. The SLA insists it is only defending itself. The talks are also likely to be hindered by the fact that the SLA has splintered into several groups. A recent UN policy meeting in Darfur was disrupted by Sudanese national security forces, which arrested and later released several of the Sudanese participants.

More than two million people have fled their homes in Darfur over the past two and half years, and an estimated 180,000 have been killed. After an international outcry last year, the Sudanese government agreed to take measures to end the violence, but international attention has moved away from the region.

Darfur is in the grip of a fresh outbreak of violence, with hundreds of civilians being killed by warring militias and the United Nations mission considering pulling out of the region.

At least 29 people were reported killed yesterday in an "unprecedented" attack on the Aro Sharow refugee camp in the northwestern area of Sudan. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said people in the camp and local villagers had been attacked by 300 "armed Arab men on horses and camels".

Over the past two months thousands of civilians have fled their villages across Darfur. At least 5,000 people have been driven to shelter in camps, saying their villages had been attacked by the pro-government militias known as the janjaweed. Hundreds more are reported to have been killed. The Sudanese government had promised to clamp down on militias operating in the region earlier this year, but both the rebel Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the janjaweed have stepped up attacks on civilians, aid workers and each other.

On Wednesday, the UN's under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, warned that the situation in Darfur was becoming so violent that the UN and other aid agencies may have to pull out. He said: "As we speak, we have had to suspend action in many areas. Tens of thousands of people will not get any assistance today because it is too dangerous and it could grow."

Since the beginning of August, more than 45 aid convoys have been attacked on roads leading to the main camps by militias who have beaten up drivers and stolen food from the vehicles. Aid agencies have now stopped using main roads, and are relying on a few helicopters to get supplies to displaced people. Local staff working at many of the camps have not had their salaries paid for months.

Nicki Bennett, based in Nyala for Oxfam, said: "The security situation in Darfur remains extremely volatile - people still face the threat of horrific violence on a daily basis, and insecurity is also hampering humanitarian access ... The African Union peacekeeping troops are helping to improve the situation in the areas where they are deployed, but there are not nearly enough of them. At the moment, there are not even 6,000 troops trying to patrol a region the size of France."
The humanitarian situation has been worsened by rains, which have flooded many of the camps. Medical workers say outbreaks of malaria and diarrhoea are increasing, but they are not able to get medicines to the worst affected areas. A fuel shortage is also hindering the delivery of food and medicines.

All sides have also intensified military operations. Last week, the SLA launched a surprise attack to gain control of the southern Darfur town of Sheiria, and on Monday, the janjaweed, in uniform and on horseback, crossed the border and killed 36 people in Chad. The Chad army, which claims to have killed seven of the attackers, said the janjaweed crossed the border to steal livestock.

Peace talks between the Sudanese government and the SLA resumed in Nigeria this week, but the AU has complained that the SLA is destabilising the talks by continuing to fight. The SLA insists it is only defending itself. The talks are also likely to be hindered by the fact that the SLA has splintered into several groups. A recent UN policy meeting in Darfur was disrupted by Sudanese national security forces, which arrested and later released several of the Sudanese participants.

More than two million people have fled their homes in Darfur over the past two and half years, and an estimated 180,000 have been killed. After an international outcry last year, the Sudanese government agreed to take measures to end the violence, but international attention has moved away from the region.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

a wimp on genocide

acoustichrmny — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 18:40:11 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/opinion/18kristof.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
---
September 18, 2005
A Wimp on Genocide
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
President Bush doesn't often find common cause with Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. But this month the Bush administration joined with those countries and others to eviscerate a forthright U.N. statement that nations have an obligation to respond to genocide.

It was our own Axis of Medieval, and it reflected the feckless response of President Bush to genocide in Darfur. It's not that he favors children being tossed onto bonfires or teenage girls being gang-raped and mutilated, but he can't bother himself to try very hard to stop these horrors, either.

It's been a year since Mr. Bush - ahead of other world leaders, and to his credit - acknowledged that genocide was unfolding in Darfur. But since then he has used that finding of genocide not to spur action but to substitute for it.

Mr. Bush's position in the U.N. negotiations got little attention. But in effect the United States successfully blocked language in the declaration saying that countries have an "obligation" to respond to genocide. In the end the declaration was diluted to say that "We are prepared to take collective action ... on a case by case basis" to prevent genocide.

That was still an immensely important statement. But it's embarrassing that in the 21st century, we can't even accept a vague obligation to fight genocide as we did in the Genocide Convention of 1948. If the Genocide Convention were proposed today, President Bush apparently would fight to kill it.

I can't understand why Mr. Bush is soft on genocide, particularly because his political base - the religious right - has been one of the groups leading the campaign against genocide in Darfur. As the National Association of Evangelicals noted in a reproachful statement about Darfur a few days ago, the Bush administration "has made minimal progress protecting millions of victims of the world's worst humanitarian crisis."

Incredibly, the Bush administration has even emerged as Sudan's little helper, threatening an antigenocide campaigner in an effort to keep him quiet. Brian Steidle, a former Marine captain, served in Darfur as a military adviser - and grew heartsick at seeing corpses of children who'd been bludgeoned to death.

In March, I wrote a column about Mr. Steidle and separately published photos that he had taken of men, women and children hacked to death. Other photos were too wrenching to publish: one showed a pupil at the Suleia Girls School; she appeared to have been burned alive, probably after being raped, and her charred arms were still in handcuffs.

Mr. Steidle is an American hero for blowing the whistle on the genocide. But, according to Mr. Steidle, the State Department has ordered him on three occasions to stop showing the photos, for fear of complicating our relations with Sudan. Mr. Steidle has also been told that he has been blacklisted from all U.S. government jobs.

The State Department should be publicizing photos of atrocities to galvanize the international community against the genocide - not conspiring with Sudan to cover them up.

I'm a broken record on Darfur because I can't get out of my head the people I've met there. On my very first visit, 18 months ago, I met families who were hiding in the desert from the militias and soldiers. But the only place to get water was at the occasional well - where soldiers would wait to shoot the men who showed up, and rape the women. So anguished families sent their youngest children, 6 or 7 years old, to the wells with donkeys to fetch water - because they were least likely to be killed or raped. The parents hated themselves for doing this, but they had no choice - they had been abandoned by the world.

That's the cost of our passivity. Perhaps it's unfair to focus so much on Mr. Bush, for there are no neat solutions and he has done more than most leaders. He at least dispatched Condi Rice to Darfur this summer - which is more interest in genocide than the TV anchors have shown.

One group, www.beawitness.org, prepared a television commercial scolding the networks for neglecting the genocide - and affiliates of NBC, CBS and ABC all refused to run it.

Still, the failures of others do not excuse Mr. Bush's own unwillingness to speak out, to impose a no-fly zone, to appoint a presidential envoy or to build an international coalition to pressure Sudan. So, Mr. Bush, let me ask you just one question: Since you portray yourself as a bold leader, since you pride yourself on your willingness to use blunt terms like "evil" - then why is it that you're so wimpish on genocide?

E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

off camera, darfur deteriorates

acoustichrmny — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 18:55:01 GMT

"Off Camera, Darfur Deteriorates"
John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen in The Boston Globe
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3639&l=1
30 August 2005
The Boston Globe

The death of Sudan's rebel leader-turned-vice-president John Garang has pushed the crisis in Darfur even further off the international radar screen. While the peace agreement that Garang crafted between his southern-based rebels and the Khartoum government has paved the way for a new government of national unity, Darfur is now suffering stage two of the ruling party's brutal counterinsurgency strategy. Stage one was well documented: the wholesale annihilation of the way of life and livelihoods of the civilian supporters of the rebellion. The Bush administration called this genocide.

Stage two, however, occurs largely off camera. The engineers of Darfur's agony are gradually exterminating the survivors of stage one -- the 2.5 million frightened civilians living in hastily erected camps. The rape of women is systematic and relentless, access to humanitarian aid is denied, and vulnerable Darfurians are losing their will to survive.

Despite pronouncements of some US and UN officials to the contrary, the security outlook across large swaths of Darfur remains dismal. Khartoum continues to provide materiel to the Janjaweed militias, who inflame ethnic divisions in Darfur aimed at stoking intercommunal conflict and fomenting anarchy. Government officials can then say that these are historic 'tribal" feuds, while those who are eager to improve relations with Sudan (read: eager to invest in the oil sector) will accept this falsehood, conveniently forgetting who set the destruction in motion.

The war in Darfur illustrates the two fundamental elements of the ruling party's strategy for maintaining power. First, its backers kill and displace as many people as they can until the international spotlight shines too brightly. Then, they turn the ethnic diversity of Sudan into an instrument of war and political control. It is a pattern of destruction that defines 16 years of misrule: in the oil fields, throughout other parts of the south, in the central Nuba Mountains, and now in Darfur.

Government officials responsible for atrocity crimes in Darfur have outsourced direct control and orchestration of Janjaweed activity and its divide-and-conquer policy to local government officials, who conjure up ways to stoke conflict between neighbors as if we were playing the board game Risk. Until the Janjaweed are dealt with decisively, the situation will remain bleak. Darfur's tormenters will not reverse their policy of support for the Janjaweed because they have too much to lose politically and militarily, and the pressure from the international community remains too muted and weak to alter their calculations.

The crisis in Sudan would abate rapidly if the international community, led by the United States, pursued three simultaneous policy tracks: civilian protection, peace promotion, and war crimes accountability.

First, civilian protection is the international community's signature failure in Darfur. Two and a half years after the government and Janjaweed began their assault, the world has managed to deploy just 5,000 troops in Darfur to observe an unimplemented ceasefire. That's it.

If this African Union-led force is to succeed, it needs a stronger mandate focused on protecting civilians and an accelerated deployment of forces to reach at least 12,000 troops. If the union cannot do this, NATO should provide the necessary forces until it reaches full strength.

Second, the new US special representative to Sudan, Roger Winter, must work with African and European counterparts to support the African Union-led peace negotiations for Darfur. The Bush administration should ensure that Winter has adequate funding and staff. Winter should also support implementation of Garang's agreement, key to overall peace in the country, and support conflict resolution in neighboring northern Uganda, which is linked directly to the Sudan conflict through Khartoum's support of the Ugandan rebels.

Third, the cycle of impunity must be broken. Accountability can be introduced if the United States and others support the work of the International Criminal Court in Darfur, and put into action the targeted sanctions that were passed by the UN Security Council well over four months ago with little sign of implementation.

The good news is that these initiatives are manageable but will happen only if the political heat on American officials is turned up a few more degrees. The battle is joined: Significant Jewish, Christian, student, and human rights constituencies across the United States are fighting indifference and an administration whose action does not match its rhetoric. Who wins the battle will determine the fate of 2.5 million homeless Darfurians.
---
John Prendergast, former director of African affairs at the National Security Council, is special adviser to the president of the International Crisis Group. Colin Thomas-Jensen is Crisis Group's media and advocacy assistant for Africa.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

detainees suffer arbitrary arrest, execution

acoustichrmny — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 04:54:12 GMT

Sudan: Detainees Suffer Arbitrary Arrest, Execution

Sudanese Government Should Commute Death Sentences, Grant Fair Trials
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/09/07/sudan11693_txt.htm
(New York, September 7, 2005) — The Sudanese government has executed prisoners who were minors at the time of their arrest, Human Rights Watch said today. Despite the human rights commitments the government has made in the peace process with southern-based rebels, death penalty defendants are routinely denied fair trials, and arbitrary arrests and detentions remain commonplace in Sudan.

“The government promised that the North-South peace accord would usher in a new day in Sudan, but we have yet to see it in the field of human rights,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Beyond the conflict in Darfur, Sudanese across the country still remain at risk of arbitrary arrest, detention and torture.”

Human Rights Watch called on the Sudanese government to commute death sentences for all those sentenced to death, estimated at more than 300 persons, instead of executing them before the new government has time to form. New parliamentarians were appointed only last week, and ministries remain to be filled by new appointees under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Khartoum should also ensure full and unimpeded access for international monitors to all conflict-related and political detainees throughout the country.

Mohammed Jamal Gesmallah and Imad Ali Abdullah, both in their twenties, were executed on August 31 in Khartoum’s Kober Prison. According to their families, they were 16 and 17 years old at the time of the crimes for which they were punished. Under international law, the death penalty must not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below 18 years of age. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty to which Sudan is a party, also prohibits this.

Human Rights Watch opposes capital punishment in all circumstances because it is inherently cruel and inhumane. In Sudan, death sentences are often carried out without notice, and many of the trials leading to the sentences lack basic fair-trial protections for the accused, in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Sudan acceded in 1986. Detainees continue to be arbitrarily arrested, held in inhumane conditions, subjected to torture and denied access to legal counsel.

“Sudan has incorporated the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other human rights treaties into its interim national constitution,” said Takirambudde. “But such steps will be meaningless if Sudanese citizens continue to suffer arbitrary arrests, torture and death sentences after unfair trials.”

In other cases, the death penalty is imposed on persons after denial of their right to a fair trial. Al-Tayeb Ali Ahmed, a 36-year-old policeman from Darfur, was accused of participating in the rebel insurgency in Darfur in January 2004 and given the death penalty. Based on a confession extracted through torture, he was convicted of crimes against the state after a summary trial at the Special Court in Fashir, North Darfur. At his trial, he had no lawyer and no opportunity to call witnesses in his defense.

The day before his scheduled execution in Kober Prison in July, Al-Tayeb’s family was notified that they could collect his body the following day. They instead called an attorney and filed an appeal to the constitutional court. The execution was stayed only 10 minutes before it was scheduled to occur.

“The death penalty cases are only one part of the problem,” said Takirambudde. “Politically-motivated arrests and detentions of individuals in conflict areas or linked to opposition groups are an almost daily event.”

Arbitrary arrests and detentions

Although Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir promised on June 30 to release all political prisoners and lift the nationwide state of emergency, except in Darfur and eastern Sudan, arbitrary arrests and detentions remain commonplace in Sudan. This public commitment followed Sudan’s signing of the peace accord between the government and the southern-based rebels, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army, in January, and the report of the United Nations’ International Commission of Inquiry for Darfur later the same month.

The U.N. commission’s report recommended that the International Committee of the Red Cross and U.N. human rights monitors be given “full and unimpeded access to all those detained in relation to the situation in Darfur.” The U.N. Mission in Sudan, established to support the peace process, is to field international human rights monitors as part of its work during the next six years of the CPA’s term. Meanwhile, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has dozens of international monitors, mostly assigned to Darfur.
Hundreds of people have been arbitrarily arrested and detained in Darfur over the past few years, often simply on the basis of their ethnicity or political affiliation. More than half of the estimated 150 people on death row in Kober Prison are believed to be from Darfur, many of them detained for politically motivated reasons. Arbitrary arrests and detentions, however, are not only linked to events in Darfur.

On August 1 and 2, during the unrest that followed John Garang’s unexpected death in a helicopter crash, more than 1,500 people were reportedly arrested in Khartoum. Many of those who were arrested have not been charged, and there are fears that some may face torture and ill-treatment in detention. The Sudanese government also has reportedly detained dozens of individuals in eastern Sudan in early 2005 following riots in Port Sudan that resulted in the deaths of at least 20 people. The Sudanese government continues to use tactics like moving prisoners around different facilities and detaining individuals in unofficial security sites to divert scrutiny.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Wes Clark on Darfur

johnpowers — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 15:26:17 GMT

http://securingamerica.com/articles/npr/2005-08-22

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

war of the future

acoustichrmny — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 18:13:10 GMT

War of the Future:
Oil Drives the Genocide in Darfur

by David Morse
---
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=14239
---
A war of the future is being waged right now in the sprawling desert region of northeastern Africa known as Sudan. The weapons themselves are not futuristic. None of the ray-guns, force-fields, or robotic storm troopers that are the stuff of science fiction; nor, for that matter, the satellite-guided Predator drones or other high-tech weapon systems at the cutting edge of today's arsenal.
No, this war is being fought with Kalashnikovs, clubs and knives. In the western region of Sudan known as Darfur, the preferred tactics are burning and pillaging, castration and rape -- carried out by Arab militias riding on camels and horses. The most sophisticated technologies deployed are, on the one hand, the helicopters used by the Sudanese government to support the militias when they attack black African villages, and on the other hand, quite a different weapon: the seismographs used by foreign oil companies to map oil deposits hundreds of feet below the surface.

This is what makes it a war of the future: not the slick PowerPoint presentations you can imagine in boardrooms in Dallas and Beijing showing proven reserves in one color, estimated reserves in another, vast subterranean puddles that stretch west into Chad, and south to Nigeria and Uganda; not the technology; just the simple fact of the oil.

This is a resource war, fought by surrogates, involving great powers whose economies are predicated on growth, contending for a finite pool of resources. It is a war straight out of the pages of Michael Klare's book, Blood and Oil; and it would be a glaring example of the consequences of our addiction to oil, if it were not also an invisible war.

Invisible?

Invisible because it is happening in Africa. Invisible because our mainstream media are subsidized by the petroleum industry. Think of all the car ads you see on television, in newspapers and magazines. Think of the narcissism implicit in our automobile culture, our suburban sprawl, our obsessive focus on the rich and famous, the giddy assumption that all this can continue indefinitely when we know it can't -- and you see why Darfur slips into darkness. And Darfur is only the tip of the sprawling, scarred state known as Sudan. Nicholas Kristof pointed out in a New York Times column that ABC News had a total of 18 minutes of Darfur coverage in its nightly newscasts all last year, and that was to the credit of Peter Jennings; NBC had only 5 minutes, CBS only 3 minutes. This is, of course, a micro-fraction of the time devoted to Michael Jackson.

Why is it, I wonder, that when a genocide takes place in Africa, our attention is always riveted on some black American miscreant superstar? During the genocide in Rwanda ten years ago, when 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in 100 days, it was the trial of O.J. Simpson that had our attention.

Yes, racism enters into our refusal to even try to understand Africa, let alone value African lives. And yes, surely we're witnessing the kind of denial that Samantha Power documents in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide; the sheer difficulty we have acknowledging genocide. Once we acknowledge it, she observes, we pay lip-service to humanitarian ideals, but stand idly by. And yes, turmoil in Africa may evoke our experience in Somalia, with its graphic images of American soldiers being dragged through the streets by their heels. But all of this is trumped, I believe, by something just as deep: an unwritten conspiracy of silence that prevents the media from making the connections that would threaten our petroleum-dependent lifestyle, that would lead us to acknowledge the fact that the industrial world's addiction to oil is laying waste to Africa.

When Darfur does occasionally make the news -- photographs of burned villages, charred corpses, malnourished children -- it is presented without context. In truth, Darfur is part of a broader oil-driven crisis in northern Africa. An estimated 300 to 400 Darfurians are dying every day. Yet the message from our media is that we Americans are "helpless" to prevent this humanitarian tragedy, even as we gas up our SUVs with these people's lives.

Even Kristof -- whose efforts as a mainstream journalist to keep Darfur in the spotlight are worthy of a Pulitzer -- fails to make the connection to oil; and yet oil was the driving force behind Sudan's civil war. Oil is driving the genocide in Darfur. Oil drives the Bush administration's policy toward Sudan and the rest of Africa. And oil is likely to topple Sudan and its neighbors into chaos.

The Context for Genocide

I will support these assertions with fact. But first, let's give Sudanese government officials in Khartoum their due. They prefer to explain the slaughter in Darfur as an ancient rivalry between nomadic herding tribes in the north and black African farmers in the south. They deny responsibility for the militias and claim they can't control them, even as they continue to train the militias, arm them, and pay them. They play down their Islamist ideology, which supported Osama bin Laden and seeks to impose Islamic fundamentalism in Sudan and elsewhere. Instead, they portray themselves as pragmatists struggling to hold together an impoverished and backwards country; all they need is more economic aid from the West, and an end to the trade sanctions imposed by the U.S. in 1997, when President Clinton added Sudan to the list of states sponsoring terrorism. Darfur, from their perspective, is an inconvenient anomaly that will go away, in time.

It is true that ethnic rivalries and racism play a part in today's conflict in Darfur. Seen in the larger context of Sudan's civil war, however, Darfur is not an anomaly; it is an extension of that conflict. The real driving force behind the North-South conflict became clear after Chevron discovered oil in southern Sudan in 1978. The traditional competition for water at the fringes of the Sahara was transformed into quite a different struggle. The Arab-dominated government in Khartoum redrew Sudan's jurisdictional boundaries to exclude the oil reserves from southern jurisdiction. Thus began Sudan's 21-year-old North-South civil war. The conflict then moved south, deep into Sudan, into wetter lands that form the headwaters of the Nile and lie far from the historical competition for water.

Oil pipelines, pumping stations, well-heads, and other key infrastructure became targets for the rebels from the South, who wanted a share in the country's new mineral wealth, much of which was on lands they had long occupied. John Garang, leader of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), declared these installations to be legitimate targets of war. For a time, the oil companies fled from the conflict, but in the 1990s they began to return. Chinese and Indian companies were particularly aggressive, doing much of their drilling behind perimeters of bermed earth guarded by troops to protect against rebel attacks. It was a Chinese pipeline to the Red Sea that first brought Sudanese oil to the international market.

Prior to the discovery of oil, this dusty terrain had little to offer in the way of exports. Most of the arable land was given over to subsistence farming: sorghum and food staples; cattle and camels. Some cotton was grown for export. Sudan, sometimes still called The Sudan, is the largest country in Africa and one of the poorest. Nearly a million square miles in area, roughly the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, it is more region than nation. Embracing some 570 distinct peoples and dozens of languages and historically ungovernable, its boundaries had been drawn for the convenience of colonial powers. Its nominal leaders in the north, living in urban Khartoum, were eager to join the global economy -- and oil was to become their country's first high-value export.

South Sudan is overwhelmingly rural and black. Less accessible from the north, marginalized under the reign of the Ottoman Turks in the nineteenth century, again under the British overlords during much of the twentieth, and now by Khartoum in the north, South Sudan today is almost devoid of schools, hospitals, and modern infrastructure.

Racism figures heavily in all this. Arabs refer to darker Africans as "abeed," a word that means something close to "slave." During the civil war, African boys were kidnapped from the south and enslaved; many were pressed into military service by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum. Racism continues to find expression in the brutal rapes now taking place in Darfur. Khartoum recruits the militias, called Janjaweed -- itself a derogatory term -- from the poorest and least educated members of nomadic Arab society.

In short, the Islamist regime has manipulated ethnic, racial, and economic tensions, as part of a strategic drive to commandeer the country's oil wealth. The war has claimed about two million lives, mostly in the south -- many by starvation, when government forces prevented humanitarian agencies from gaining access to camps. Another four million Sudanese remain homeless. The regime originally sought to impose shariah, or Islamic, law on the predominantly Christian and animist South. Khartoum dropped this demand, however, under terms of the Comprehensive Peace Treaty signed last January. The South was to be allowed to operate under its own civil law, which included rights for women; and in six years, southerners could choose by plebiscite whether to separate or remain part of a unified Sudan. The all-important oil revenues would be divided between Khartoum and the SPLA-held territory. Under a power-sharing agreement, SPLA commander John Garang would be installed as vice president of Sudan, alongside President Omar al-Bashir.

Darfur, to the west, was left out of this treaty. In a sense, the treaty -- brokered with the help of the U.S. -- was signed at the expense of Darfur, a parched area the size of France, sparsely populated but oil rich. It has an ancient history of separate existence as a kingdom lapping into Chad, separate from the area known today as Sudan. Darfur's population is proportionately more Muslim and less Christian than southern Sudan's, but is mostly black African, and identifies itself by tribe, such as the Fur. (Darfur, in fact, means "land of the Fur.") The Darfurian practice of Islam was too lax to suit the Islamists who control Khartoum. And so Darfurian villages have been burned to clear the way for drilling and pipelines, and to remove any possible sanctuaries for rebels. Some of the land seized from black farmers is reportedly being given to Arabs brought in from neighboring Chad.

Oil and Turmoil

With the signing of the treaty last January, and the prospect of stability for most of war-torn Sudan, new seismographic studies were undertaken by foreign oil companies in April. These studies had the effect of doubling Sudan's estimated oil reserves, bringing them to at least 563 million barrels. They could yield substantially more. Khartoum claims the amount could total as much as 5 billion barrels. That's still a pittance compared to the 674 billion barrels of proven oil reserves possessed by the six Persian Gulf countries -- Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iran, and Qatar. The very modesty of Sudan's reserves speaks volumes to the desperation with which industrial nations are grasping for alternative sources of oil.

The rush for oil is wreaking havoc on Sudan. Oil revenues to Khartoum have been about $1 million a day, exactly the amount which the government funnels into arms -- helicopters and bombers from Russia, tanks from Poland and China, missiles from Iran. Thus, oil is fueling the genocide in Darfur at every level. This is the context in which Darfur must be understood -- and, with it, the whole of Africa. The same Africa whose vast tapestry of indigenous cultures, wealth of forests and savannas was torn apart by three centuries of theft by European colonial powers -- seeking slaves, ivory, gold, and diamonds -- is being devastated anew by the 21st century quest for oil.

Sudan is now the seventh biggest oil producer in Africa after Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Angola, Egypt, and Equatorial Guinea.

Oil has brought corruption and turmoil in its wake virtually wherever it has been discovered in the developing world. Second only perhaps to the arms industry, its lack of transparency and concentration of wealth invites kickbacks and bribery, as well as distortions to regional economies.

"There is no other commodity that produces such great profit," said Terry Karl in an interview with Miren Gutierrez, for the International Press Service, "and this is generally in the context of highly concentrated power, very weak bureaucracies, and weak rule of law." Karl is co-author of a Catholic Relief Services report on the impact of oil in Africa, entitled Bottom of the Barrel. He cites the examples of Gabon, Angola and Nigeria, which began exploiting oil several decades ago and suffer from intense corruption. In Nigeria, as in Angola, an overvalued exchange rate has destroyed the non-oil economy. Local revolts over control of oil revenues also have triggered sweeping military repression in the Niger delta.

Oil companies and exploration companies like Halliburton wield political and sometimes military power. In Sudan, roads and bridges built by oil firms have been used to attack otherwise remote villages. Canada's largest oil company, Talisman, is now in court for allegedly aiding Sudan government forces in blowing up a church and killing church leaders, in order to clear the land for pipelines and drilling. Under public pressure in Canada, Talisman has sold its holdings in Sudan. Lundin Oil AB, a Swedish company, withdrew under similar pressure from human rights groups.

Michael Klare suggests that oil production is intrinsically destabilizing:

"When countries with few other resources of national wealth exploit their petroleum reserves, the ruling elites typically monopolize the distribution of oil revenues, enriching themselves and their cronies while leaving the rest of the population mired in poverty -- and the well-equipped and often privileged security forces of these 'petro-states' can be counted on to support them."
Compound these antidemocratic tendencies with the ravenous thirst of the rapidly growing Chinese and Indian economies, and you have a recipe for destabilization in Africa. China's oil imports climbed by 33% in 2004, India's by 11%. The International Energy Agency expects them to use 11.3 million barrels a day by 2010, which will be more than one-fifth of global demand.

Keith Bradsher, in a New York Times article, 2 Big Appetites Take Seats at the Oil Table, observes:

"As Chinese and Indian companies venture into countries like Sudan, where risk-aversive multinationals have hesitated to enter, questions are being raised in the industry about whether state-owned companies are accurately judging the risks to their own investments, or whether they are just more willing to gamble with taxpayers' money than multinationals are willing to gamble with shareholders' investments."
The geopolitical implications of this tolerance for instability are borne out in Sudan, where Chinese state-owned companies exploited oil in the thick of fighting. As China and India seek strategic access to oil -- much as Britain, Japan, and the United States jockeyed for access to oil fields in the years leading up to World War II -- the likelihood of destabilizing countries like Sudan rises exponentially.

Last June, following the new seismographic exploration in Sudan and with the new power-sharing peace treaty about to be implemented, Khartoum and the SPLA signed a flurry of oil deals with Chinese, Indian, British, Malaysian, and other oil companies.

Desolate Sudan, Desolate World

This feeding frenzy may help explain the Bush administration's schizophrenic stance toward Sudan. On the one hand, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared in September 2004 that his government had determined that what was happening in Darfur was "genocide" -- which appears to have been a pre-election sop to conservative Christians, many with missions in Africa. On the other hand, not only did the President fall silent on Darfur after the election, but his administration has lobbied quietly against the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act in Congress.

That bill, how in committee, calls for beefing up the African Union peacekeeping force and imposing new sanctions on Khartoum, including referring individual officials to the International Criminal Court (much hated by the administration). The White House, undercutting Congressional efforts to stop the genocide, is seeking closer relations with Khartoum on grounds that the regime was "cooperating in the war on terror."

Nothing could end the slaughter faster than the President of the United States standing up for Darfur and making a strong case before the United Nations. Ours is the only country with such clout. This is unimaginable, of course, for various reasons. It seems clear that Bush, and the oil companies that contributed so heavily to his 2000 presidential campaign, would like to see the existing trade sanctions on Sudan removed, so U.S. companies can get a piece of the action. Instead of standing up, the President has kept mum -- leaving it to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to put the best face she can on his policy of appeasing Khartoum.

On July 8, SPLA leader John Garang was sworn in as vice president of Sudan, before a throng of 6 million cheering Sudanese. President Oman Bashir spoke in Arabic. Garang spoke in English, the preferred language among educated southerners, because of the country's language diversity. Sudan's future had never looked brighter. Garang was a charismatic and forceful leader who wanted a united Sudan. Three weeks later, Garang was killed in a helicopter crash. When word of his death emerged, angry riots broke out in Khartoum, and in Juba, the capital of South Sudan. Men with guns and clubs roamed the streets, setting fire to cars and office buildings. One hundred and thirty people were killed, thousands wounded.

No evidence of foul play in his death has been uncovered, as of this writing. The helicopter went down in rain and fog over mountainous terrain. Nevertheless, suspicions are rampant. SPLA and government officials are calling for calm, until the crash can be investigated by an international team of experts. All too ominously, the disaster recalls the 1994 airplane crash that killed Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, who was trying to implement a power-sharing agreement between Hutus and Tutsis. That crash touched off the explosive Rwandan genocide.

What Garang's death will mean for Sudan is unclear. The new peace was already precarious. His chosen successor, Salva Kiir Mayardit, appears less committed to a united Sudan

Nowhere is the potential impact of renewed war more threatening than in the camps of refugees -- the 4 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), driven from their homes during the North-South civil war, several hundred thousand encamped at the fringes of Khartoum as squatters or crowded into sprawling ghetto neighborhoods. Further west, in Darfur and Chad, another 2.5 million IDPs live in the precarious limbo of makeshift camps, in shelters cobbled together from plastic and sticks -- prevented by the Janjaweed from returning to their villages, wholly dependent on outside aid.

In short, Sudan embodies a collision between a failed state and a failed energy policy. Increasingly, ours is a planet whose human population is devoted to extracting what it can, regardless of the human and environmental cost. The Bush energy policy, crafted by oil companies, is predicated on a far different future from the one any sane person would want his or her children to inherit -- a desolate world that few Americans, cocooned by the media's silence, are willing to imagine.

David Morse is an independent journalist and political analyst whose articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire, Friends Journal, the Nation, the New York Times Magazine, the Progressive Populist, Salon, and elsewhere. His novel, The Iron Bridge (Harcourt Brace, 1998), predicted a series of petroleum wars in the first two decades of the 21st century.

© 2005 David Morse

###

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Oil Drive the Genocide in Darfur

johnpowers — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 22:26:50 GMT

There are so many reasons that make discussing Darfur difficult with people here in the USA. Much of the broader interest in the Sudan came about through evangelica Christians paying attention to the civil war there. But resources are at the core of the "divide and rule" tragedy which has been playing out since independence. Here's a good article I just saw http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=14239

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

garang

acoustichrmny — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 23:03:51 GMT

http://www.sudantribune.com/article.php3?id_article=10904
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KHARTOUM, Aug 1 (AFP) — Deadly rioting rocked the Sudanese capital after a helicopter crash killed Sudan’s new vice president and ex-southern rebel leader John Garang, dealing a blow to a fledgling January peace deal that ended Africa’s longest-running war.

Authorities imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the capital following the violence that erupted when thousands of people, some wielding knives and guns, took to the streets of Khartoum immediately after Garang’s weekend death was confirmed.

Bursts of automatic gunfire could be heard and an AFP correspondent saw several people lying wounded, some possibly dead, while a European diplomat cited reports of dead bodies in streets where cars had been set ablaze.

The United States dispatched two senior envoys to Sudan on Monday in hopes of keeping the peace process on track.

Connie Newman, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, and Roger Winter, special representative for Sudan, headed for Khartoum and the country’s south, according to State Department spokesman Tom Casey.

Casey said the two would "confer with the parties and encourage them to maintain momentum on the comprehensive peace agreement" signed in January to end two decades of civil war.

Top political and military officials of southern Sudan’s former rebel group, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), convened a crisis meeting to elect a leader to replace Garang and plan his funeral.

"The purpose of the meeting is the management of a national crisis. We are mourning, but we have the courage to move forward and complete the mission," said Pagan Amum, a political operative in Rumbek, the provisional capital of autonomous southern Sudan.

In Khartoum, authorities released no official death toll following the rioting, but the situation appeared to have been brought under control after security deployed en masse in the capital and the curfew took effect at 1500 GMT, witnesses said.

Meanwhile, residents of the southern town of Juba, which is to become the capital of the southern region, said angry protesters had burned and vandalized businesses and property owned by northern Sudanese Arabs.

They are seen as close to the Islamic government in Khartoum against which the SPLM/A had until January fought for 21 years.

"It’s calm now," one witness said, adding that the situation had quieted after an appeal for restraint by SPLM leaders but noting that smoke could still be seen rising from shops and property that had been torched earlier in the day.

The situation in Khartoum and Juba turned ugly after Sudanese President Omar el-Beshir confirmed that Garang had died en route from Uganda to his base in southern Sudan when the Ugandan Russian-built helicopter in which he was traveling crashed in Sudan’s Eastern Equatorial province near the border with Uganda.

The crash, which Ugandan officials blamed on poor weather, "resulted in the death of John Garang and six people accompanying him as well as seven members of the crew of the Ugandan presidential aircraft," Beshir said in a statement read on state television.

Garang had been returning to his New Site base after talks with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and US and European diplomats about the progress in implementing the January 9 peace deal to end the long-running war that killed more than 1.5 million and forced millions of others from their homes.

In Kampala, Museveni told Ugandan lawmakers that he had ordered a probe into the crash and said his government had contacted an unspecified foreign power to confirm it had been an accident and not the result of "sabotage or terrorism." A Ugandan official said none of the 14 people on board Museveni’s MI-172 executive helicopter, purchased eight years ago, had survived.

Garang, 60, the head of the SPLM/A, became Sudan’s vice president only three weeks ago when the January peace agreement signed in Kenya began to be implemented in earnest with the formation a new national unity government.

His death sparked immediate concerns for the agreement as well as for peaceful resolutions to conflicts in Sudan’s troubled western Darfur region and the restive east of the country where rebel groups have complained of discrimination and repression similar to that which prompted the SPLM/A to take up arms in 1983.

Many had seen the north-south deal and in particular Garang’s new position in Khartoum and credibility among mainly Christian and animist black Africans as hopeful signs for resolving Sudan’s other disputes.

And despite vows from Beshir and the SPLM/A leadership to carry on with the peace deal, many analysts and previous mediators voiced concerns that Garang’s absence from the scene would be hinder efforts to secure peace.

"We guarantee that the peace process will continue progressing in the same direction," Beshir said in his statement. "His passing will only reinforce our determination to pursue the peace process."

posted in Sudan - 1 reply

memo to community on darfur

acoustichrmny — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 19:45:46 GMT

Memo to the Community on Darfur

To:Interested Parties
From: Peter Ogden, Coordinator, International Rights and Responsibilities Program

Date: July 19, 2005
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http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=895293
---
Today Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice departs for her first trip to the Darfur region of Sudan, one year after Congress formally declared that the hundreds of thousands of killings, rapes and forced displacements occurring in Darfur constitute genocide.

Secretary Rice will have the opportunity to witness firsthand whether the steps taken by the Bush administration to stop the genocide have lived up to the promise that the pesident made in his second inaugural address: "[A]ll who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors."

The answer is clear: the Bush administration has failed the people of Sudan and the cause of freedom.

There has been some progress made in the past year: the United States has increased its aid to the region to nearly $500 million, a separate and long-running civil war in Sudan between the north and the south has ended, and the ICC has begun the long but important process of bringing the perpetrators to justice.

None of these measures, however, is enough to stop genocide, as the secretary will see for herself.

If Secretary Rice and the Bush administration intend to bring an end to a genocide that has been unfolding since February 2003, they must immediately do the following:

Provide $200 million for the immediate deployment of at least 4,000 additional African Union peacekeepers and personnel: The AU – whose peacekeepers are the sole protection provided by the international community for the citizen of Darfur – has agreed to expand its mission by at least 4,000 troops and personnel by September, but needs $200 million to do so. With fewer than 3,000 AU peacekeepers on the ground at present, this expansion is essential – yet the Bush administration announced on Friday that it would offer only $6 million to help deploy these additional troops.
Support the bipartisan Darfur Peace and Accountability Act (HR 3127), which calls for a stronger African Union mandate, authorizes the United States to provide necessary support for the AU mission, and calls for the appointment of a special envoy to Sudan. The Bush administration has been hostile to proposed legislation from Congress over the past year, going so far as to demand that the Darfur Accountability Act be stripped from the supplemental bill last May. The administration must not block the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act of 2005.
Apply coordinated international pressure on the Sudanese government through the U.N. Security Council. The presence of AU troops on the ground in Darfur is due not only to the AU's commitment to stopping the genocide, but also to coordinated pressure on Khartoum by all members of the Security Council, including China and Russia. Over the past year, however, the U.S. has failed to engage the other members of the Security Council in developing and implementing a strategy for compelling Khartoum to abandon its own strategy of genocide.

Please also visit www.beawitness.org to find out how you can help increase media coverage of the crisis in Darfur.

Peter Ogden is the coordinator of the International Rights and Responsibilities Program at the Center for American Progress.

posted in Sudan - 3 replies

au forces can stop violence against women

acoustichrmny — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 20:09:37 GMT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
JULY 22, 2005
9:20 AM CONTACT: Refugees International
Sarah Martin and Sayre Nyce
ri@refugeesinternational.org or 202.828.0110

Sudan: U.S. support to the African Union forces can stop violence against women
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http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/newsprint.cgi?file=/news2005/0722-03.htm
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WASHINGTON - July 22 - Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s decision to address the issue of violence against women in Darfur during her recent visit to the region is an important step as part of the U.S. Government’s on-going effort to end violence and impunity there. As the Secretary has rightly pointed out, ending violence against women in Darfur requires better security on the ground. Where visible African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) forces are present, violence has diminished. AMIS forces are currently being expanded to 7,700 from the current 3,000. While this is a positive development, the force as it is currently configured is unable to provide adequate protection for the women of Darfur because of inadequate numbers of troops and an insufficiently robust mandate.
Refugees International is also concerned that in the context of U.S. support to the African Union in planning this mission, insufficient attention is being paid to potential sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeeping troops and the need for HIV-awareness and prevention among them.

AMIS troops operate under a mandate that allows them to protect civilians encountered who are “under imminent threat and in the immediate vicinity, within the limits of mission capability,” as civilian protection is the Government of Sudan’s responsibility. In the Abu-shouk displaced persons camp that Secretary Rice visited in North Darfur, women have to leave the relative safety of the camp to gather firewood. RI and other agencies have documented that women are frequently raped when they leave the camp, sometimes by Janjaweed militia but also by men in the Sudanese army and police who are stationed outside the camp. Clearly, the Government of Sudan is failing in its responsibility to protect civilians.

Humanitarian agencies in North Darfur asked AMIS peacekeeping forces to patrol the firewood routes in order to discourage rapists from attacking women. While this operation was successful in Abu-shouk, these actions are not necessarily being replicated throughout Darfur, as individual commanders can interpret their mandate differently. The African Union must strengthen the current mandate for AMIS troops to give priority to civilian protection and give them the explicit authority to carry out operations against the Janjaweed and the Government of Sudan’s forces that collaborate with them to attack women.

Even 7,700 troops will not be sufficient to provide protection for the women of Darfur. A recent International Crisis Group report argued that 12-16,000 troops are urgently needed in Darfur to provide adequate security. The mandate, however, is perhaps even more important. A clear and strong mandate to protect civilians is critical if AMIS is to be able to prevent Darfurian women from being attacked and raped.

The United Nations is currently addressing the problem of sexual exploitation and abuse of vulnerable women by its peacekeeping troops in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi. While the UN has worked to ensure that UN peacekeeping troops are being properly trained and that disciplinary standards are in place, similar attention and training are not currently being provided to AMIS. Since sexual exploitation and abuse of vulnerable women is not limited to UN peacekeeping troops but has plagued militaries around the world, it is imperative that AMIS troops be held to the same standards as UN peacekeeping troops. The U.S. is addressing this issue in its own military and can provide training and assistance.

African militaries have high rates of HIV infection. Although the UN Security Council has declared mandatory inclusion of HIV prevention programs in UN peacekeeping missions, there are currently no plans to do so for the African Union. A recent U.S. Department of Defense initiative has attempted to strengthen African militaries’ attempts to assess HIV infection rates and train its soldiers in HIV awareness. This initiative must be expanded to include all of the African troops that are being deployed to Darfur. The U.S. should provide support in ensuring that these peacekeeping troops are trained in HIV awareness and prevention.

Therefore Refugees International recommends that:

* The U.S. Congress ensure that adequate funds for the AMIS peacekeeping mission are given, particularly for logistic support;

* The U.S. government provide training and support to countries contributing troops to AMIS on prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse;

* The U.S. government provide training and support to countries contributing troops to AMIS on HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention.
###

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

be a witness

acoustichrmny — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 21:44:22 GMT

Today, we are launching a new American Progress Action Fund campaign in conjunction with the Genocide Intervention Fund:

www.BeAWitness.org

The BeAWitness campaign is about the genocide in Darfur region of the Sudan, where a government-backed campaign of ethnic cleansing has already taken the lives of as many as 400,000 and has displaced hundreds of thousands more.

Genocide is the ultimate crime against humanity, but our major television news networks and cable stations are failing to show us the genocide. During June 2005 while an estimated ten thousand people were killed in Darfur, CNN, FOXNews, NBC/MSNBC, ABC, and CBS ran 50 times as many stories about Michael Jackson and 12 times as many stories about Tom Cruise as they did about this genocide. We can’t stop what we don’t see.

Visit the site today and tell our TV news networks to Be A Witness to genocide.

At BeAWitness, we’ll be keeping our eyes on the media to ensure that they are keeping our eyes on the genocide. Whether it is coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s, or recent coverage of the tsunami, we have seen how television coverage can drive government action, help stop grave injustices, and end human suffering.

Please come to our site to learn more about the Darfur genocide and what you can do about it. Television news can’t stop genocide alone, but genocide IS news:

www.BeAWitness.org

Thank you,

Brian Komar and the entire BeAWitness Team

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

a policy of rape

acoustichrmny — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 22:17:10 GMT

A Policy of Rape
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYALA, Sudan
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/opinion/05kristof.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print
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All countries have rapes, of course. But here in the refugee shantytowns of Darfur, the horrific stories that young women whisper are not of random criminality but of a systematic campaign of rape to terrorize civilians and drive them from "Arab lands" - a policy of rape.

One measure of the international community's hypocrisy is that the world is barely bothering to protest. More than two years after the genocide in Darfur began, the women of Kalma Camp - a teeming squatter's camp of 110,000 people driven from their burned villages - still face the risk of gang rape every single day as they go out looking for firewood.

Nemat, a 21-year-old, told me that she left the camp with three friends to get firewood to cook with. In the early afternoon a group of men in uniforms caught and gang-raped her.

"They said, 'You are black people. We want to wipe you out,' " Nemat recalled. After the attack, Nemat was too injured to walk, but her relatives found her and carried her back to camp on a donkey.

A neighbor, Toma, 34, said she heard similar comments from seven men in police uniforms who raped her. "They said, 'We want to finish you people off,' " she recalled.

Sometimes the women simply vanish. A young mother named Asha cried as she told how she and her four sisters were chased down by a Janjaweed militia; she escaped but all her sisters were caught.

"To this day, I don't know if they are alive or dead," she sobbed. Then she acknowledged that she had another reason for grief: a Janjaweed militia had also murdered her husband 23 days earlier.

Gang rape is terrifying anywhere, but particularly so here. Women who are raped here are often ostracized for life, even forced to build their own huts and live by themselves. In addition, most girls in Darfur undergo an extreme form of genital cutting called infibulation that often ends with a midwife stitching the vagina shut with a thread made of wild thorns. This stitching and the scar tissue make sexual assault a particularly violent act, and the resulting injuries increase the risk of H.I.V. transmission.

Sudan has refused to allow aid groups to bring into Darfur more rape kits that include medication that reduces the risk of infection from H.I.V.

The government has also imprisoned rape victims who became pregnant, for adultery. Even those who simply seek medical help are harassed and humiliated.

On March 26, a 17-year-old student named Hawa went to a French-run clinic in Kalma and reported that she had been raped. A French midwife examined her and confirmed that she was bleeding and had been raped.

But an informer in the clinic alerted the police, who barged in and - over the determined protests of two Frenchwomen - carried Hawa off to a police hospital, where she was chained to a cot by one leg and one arm. A doctor there declared that she had not been raped after all, and Hawa was then imprisoned for a couple of days. The authorities are now proposing that she be charged with submitting false information.

The attacks are sometimes purely about humiliation. Some women are raped with sticks that tear apart their insides, leaving them constantly trickling urine. One Sudanese woman working for a European aid organization was raped with a bayonet.

Doctors Without Borders issued an excellent report in March noting that it alone treated almost 500 rapes in a four-and-a-half-month period. Sudan finally reacted to the report a few days ago - by arresting an Englishman and a Dutchman working for Doctors Without Borders.

Those women who spoke to me risked arrest and lifelong shame by telling their stories. Their courage should be an inspiration to us - and above all, to President Bush - to speak out. Mr. Bush finally let the word Darfur pass his lips on Wednesday, after 142 days of silence, but only during a photo op. Such silence amounts to acquiescence, for this policy of rape flourishes only because it is ignored.

I'm still chilled by the matter-of-fact explanation I received as to why it is women who collect firewood, even though they're the ones who are raped. The reason is an indication of how utterly we are failing the people of Darfur, two years into the first genocide of the 21st century.

"It's simple," one woman here explained. "When the men go out, they're killed. The women are only raped."

E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com

posted in Sudan - 1 reply

bush complacency?

acoustichrmny — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 23:17:45 GMT

Bush Accused of Complacency, Double-Dealing on Darfur
Jim Lobe
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http://ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=28803
---
WASHINGTON, May 24 (IPS) - Nine months after his administration first declared that ongoing violence in Darfur constituted ''genocide,'' U.S. President George W. Bush was urged by some 80 human rights and religious groups and prominent individuals here Tuesday to do more to protect innocent civilians in Sudan's western Darfur region.

In a letter to the White House, the activists called specifically for Washington to submit a resolution at the U.N. Security Council authorising an African Union (AU) mission there to use force to protect civilians. It also called for the administration to mobilise a ''robust international force'' to augment the AU mission.

Such a force should include troops, financial and logistical support from countries outside Africa, presumably including the United States, according to the letter, which was written by the advocacy group Africa Action and signed by the leaders of the American Jewish World Service, the Coalition for International Justice, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), and the National Council of Churches USA, among many others, as well as seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC).

''(Bush's) senior aides say he remains engaged but has more pressing matters. But what could be more important than stopping the genocide?'' asked Africa Action director Salih Booker at a press briefing Tuesday. ''What has been done so far to stop the genocide is inadequate and morally unacceptable''.

The letter, whose signers also included the leaders of other national Jewish and Christian organisations, said that as many as 400,000 people have lost their lives in Darfur, and that another 2.5 million people have been displaced as a result of raids and bombing by government forces and government-backed Arab militias, called the Janjaweed, since the violence began in early 2003. It said the death toll could reach up to a million people by the end of the year.

The vast majority of victims have been members of African tribal groups who, though Muslim like the National Islamic Front (NIF) government and the Janjaweed, have been systematically driven off their lands in what many experts have concluded has been a campaign of ''ethnic cleansing,'' if not ''genocide'' as the Bush administration itself declared for the first time last September.

The campaign has been so brutal that it was referred by the Security Council, at the urging of a special U.N. commission, to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigation and prosecution.

Thousands of people have been killed outright, tens of thousands of women and girls have suffered rape; entire villages and farms have been put to the torch, sometimes more than once. Most of the deaths have been caused by starvation or disease among the displaced. According to some estimates, the death rate in Darfur is currently running as high as 500 a day.

The Bush administration, which over the past year took the lead in getting several Security Council resolutions deploring the violence and authorising the AU mission approved, has appeared much less aggressive in recent months, although it has continued to provide substantial logistical support to the AU and humanitarian assistance for the displaced.

Senior officials have cited the likely difficulties of rallying international support behind new resolutions that would impose sanctions against Sudan or authorise the use of force by AU monitors to prevent attacks on civilians, as activists have demanded.

They argue that China, a major investor in Sudan's burgeoning oil industry, or Russia, which has sold tens of millions of dollars in weapons systems to Khartoum in recent years, are likely to veto such measures if they come to the Security Council.

In addition, the officials say they are concerned that a more-aggressive U.S. stance could also wreck a historic accord between Khartoum and southern rebel groups that officially ended a 22-year-old civil war in January.

But activists, who note that Bush himself has been silent on Darfur since the end of last year, are concerned that his reticence actually signals a policy shift spurred by growing covert cooperation between U.S. and Sudan's intelligence services in the so-called ''global war on terror''. Khartoum, which hosted al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden for several years in the 1990s, has tried to persuade Washington of its utility in that respect since shortly after the Sep.11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had secretly flown Khartoum's intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Salah Abdallah Gosh, to Washington for high-level meetings with his U.S. counterparts last month despite the fact that he has been accused of directing military attacks in Darfur, the Los Angeles Times reported recently.

The visit, which U.S. officials subsequently confirmed, outraged human rights and Africa activists.

''It's like bringing (Hitler's air force chief Hermann) Goehring and some of those Nazis here during World War Two while the genocide (against the Jews) was still going on,''. Donald Payne, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Africa subcommittee, said Tuesday.

''We've seen a shift in policy and it's very disturbing,'' he added, saying that the House leadership, acting at the administration's behest, had stripped from a 2005 spending bill bipartisan legislation that would have toughened U.S. sanctions against Sudan and called for Bush to seek multilateral sanctions, including an arms embargo, against the government at the United Nations.

Activists were also alarmed by remarks made during last month's visit to Sudan by Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick who not only steadfastly declined to use the word ''genocide'' to describe what was happening in Darfur, but also suggested that the death toll was not nearly as high as cited by activists or even the United Nations.

Citing a State Department study, Zoellick estimated total deaths caused by the conflict in Darfur at between 60,000 and 160,000 -- an assessment that was dismissed as impossibly low by the Washington Post, which compared the results and methodologies of several recent studies.

While Zoellick subsequently insisted that he did not mean to play down the extent of suffering in Darfur, the administration's continuing passivity at the U.N. and its relative silence about the continuing violence have contributed to the impression that Bush, who is reported to have once written ''Not on my watch'' on a memo about Bill Clinton's failure to do anything to stop the 1994 Rwanda genocide, is unlikely to take stronger action unless and until he faces a political cost for not doing so.

Meanwhile, according to Leonard Rubinstein, PHR's executive director, ''the people of Darfur face more killing and the destruction of their livelihoods.''

''We're not doing close to enough'', he said, noting that it took the deaths of 2,000 Bosnian Muslims before the international community forcefully intervened in that country a decade ago. ''How many people will have to die before we do enough in Darfur?''

(END/2005)

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

kristof interactive

acoustichrmny — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 23:11:58 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/06/07/opinion/20050607_DARFUR_AUDIOSS.html?th&emc=th

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

bush backs away

acoustichrmny — Fri, 27 May 2005 17:12:56 GMT

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=712369#1
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SUDAN
Bush Backs Away

During the past two years, hundreds of thousands of people have been systematically killed in Sudan. A State Department investigation into human rights abuses determined that genocide had been committed in Darfur, and the government was responsible. Today, experts expect Darfur's death toll to be even larger this year than last. This week finally brought some good – albeit late and limited – news: International donors “pledged an additional $200 million Thursday to fund the African Union peacekeeping operation in Sudan's western Darfur.” NATO also pledged air support in the form of helicopters to back up the AU. It was a much-needed first step, but should only be the beginning of a robust commitment by the international community to end the genocide. That, however, will take U.S. leadership – but President Bush has been unwilling to lead and in recent months has been strangely silent on Sudan.

READ HIS LIPS: 137 days. That’s how long it’s been since President Bush has publicly mentioned the word Darfur. (And even that mention was to praise humanitarian workers, not to condemn the ongoing massacre.) As genocide unfolds in the Sudan, Bush has put his leadership on hold. To put this in context, the Coalition for International Justice estimates 500 people die in Sudan every day.

WHITE HOUSE FIGHTS AGAINST ACTION: Some lawmakers have tried to step into Bush’s leadership vacuum to take action in Sudan. Led by Sens. Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Jon Corzine (D-NJ), the Senate last month unanimously passed the Darfur Accountability Act. The act would have pledged $90 million in U.S. aid for Darfur; even more important, it would have provided the framework to halt the atrocities by freezing the assets of the genocide’s leaders, accelerating assistance to the African Union mission in Darfur, and establishing a no-fly zone over Darfur. But the White House actively fought against it. On April 25, the White House sent a letter to its congressional allies in the House instructing them to delete the provisions about Darfur from the recent supplemental appropriations bill.

ALBRIGHT STEPS UP: Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called on the international community to give the African Union far greater support. The AU currently has nearly 2,500 troops deployed in Sudan and may add another 3,000 police and troops this summer; that’s not nearly enough to patrol an area roughly the size of France. Albright argues, “NATO should put a brigade-sized element at the disposal of the United Nations to augment the AU force until it can build up sufficient strength of its own.” Albright also called on NATO to “seek authority from the Security Council for a new … resolution establishing a no-flight zone over Darfur.” The International Crisis Group has also issued a statement calling for international intervention to stop the killing in Darfur: http://www.darfurpeaceanddevelopment.org/icg.htm.

ZOELLICK ZIG ZAGS: Another sign the White House is backing off its pledge to stop the slaughter in Sudan came during Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick’s recent trip to Sudan. Zoellick downplayed the genocide, instead equivocating, "It's been a terrible series of events, and as you know, there's a debate. The [United Nations] did a legal analysis of whether this was genocide, and their conclusion was that it was crimes against humanity as opposed to genocide.” Then, asked how many people the United States thinks have died in Darfur, Zoellick “gave an astonishingly low estimate of 60,000 to 160,000 people.” Some experts say the death count since the genocide began two years ago is at least double that, closer to 400,000.

WHAT HAPPENED: One reason the administration is edging away from its pledge to fight the genocide in Sudan: The White House wants to count Sudan as an ally against terrorism. The Los Angeles Times recently reported the Bush administration is maintaining a clandestine friendship with Sudanese intelligence leader Maj. Gen Salah Abdallah Gosh, who is also playing a “key role” in directing the slaughter in Darfur. Just last month, the CIA ferried Gosh to Washington "for secret meetings sealing Khartoum's sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the administration." Here’s the bottom line: The president has acknowledged the fight against terrorism is going to last several generations; the White House must learn to get what it needs from the Pakistans, Uzbekistans, and Sudans of this world without abandoning wholesale the values that are allegedly driving White House policy.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

professor urges action on darfur

acoustichrmny — Tue, 17 May 2005 18:06:22 GMT

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/17/darfur/print.html
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"There's just no way I can walk away"
A professor urges action on Darfur, saying the U.S. should be embarrassed about declaring the violence genocide while doing so little to stop it.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Julia Scott

May 17, 2005 | As southern Sudan enjoys the first fruits of peace from the comprehensive treaty it signed with the Khartoum government on Jan. 9, ending a 21-year civil war, hundreds of civilians continue to die violently on a daily basis in Sudan's western region of Darfur. The situation in Darfur exploded in February 2003 after the Islamic regime disarmed insurgent African groups and left weapons in the hands of Arab militias, which it then hired to control the insurgency. The Arab militias began slaughtering and raping Darfuri civilians and razing their villages, displacing 2 million people and creating an untold humanitarian crisis.

In July 2004, Congress led the world in unanimously declaring the violence in Darfur a genocide, as the Bush administration also subsequently did. And Congress is considering the Darfur Accountability Act, which would take strong steps against the Khartoum regime and provide support for the meager African Union monitoring force that is now in Darfur.

But recent media reports suggest the Bush administration may be backing off its earlier genocide determination, and even trying to neuter the Darfur Accountability Act.

While the world was wringing its hands over Darfur, Smith College English professor and Sudan expert Eric Reeves was taking action on the tragedy. Since becoming involved with Sudan in 1999, Reeves has taken off six semesters to focus on raising awareness about the genocide. His writing has appeared in over 150 publications; State Department officials read his reports, and journalists quote his mortality assessments. Reeves also led the divestment campaign that eventually forced Talisman Energy, a Canadian oil and gas company that was operating in Sudan, to exit the country.

Asked what the world can do now about what he says is "arguably the most destructive civil conflict since World War II," Reeves told Salon, in a phone interview from his home in Northampton, Mass., "We can pass all the U.N. resolutions we want, but if we don't see to it that Khartoum is forced to adhere, none of these will make any difference ... If we wait for meaningful action from the U.N., we will be waiting forever." What's needed to stop the genocide, Reeves said, is immediate humanitarian intervention and military support to protect civilians and aid operations.

How did Sudan become your central preoccupation?

I just finished my 26th year as a professor at Smith. About a dozen years ago, I also began a career as a wood-turner, and found that my work was marketable. I resolved that all the profits I made would go to humanitarian organizations, and that led to contributions to Doctors Without Borders, or Médécins Sans Frontières. In January 1999, I met in New York with Joelle Tanguy, the executive director of MSF at the time, and our conversation turned to Sudan. It was looking more and more intractable; that year, MSF named it the most underreported humanitarian crisis in the world.

At some point, she said something to the effect of "Sudan needs a champion." And for reasons I couldn't fully explain, I said, "I'll see what I can do." That launched what became a very intensive Sudan career that's now over six years old.

There have been six semesters in which I've found myself doing both Sudan and teaching, and that has been almost overwhelmingly difficult. In fact, three years ago I tried to retire from Sudan work. But I found after a week I couldn't retire. I'm not unusual in finding that Sudan presents a spectacle of human destruction and suffering that is overwhelmingly compelling. Even before I traveled to Sudan I'd met many Sudanese, looked into many Sudanese eyes -- there's just no way I can walk away from these people. Not with the powerful voice I've developed; it registers in a lot of important places.

I can assure you that I won't rest until peace comes to Darfur, and it is a peace that is sustainable throughout the country.

What was the catalyst for the crisis in Darfur?

The current conflict arose in February 2003 out of the Khartoum National Islamic Front Regime's asymmetric disarming of African tribal groups, leaving weapons in the hands of Arab militias and taking them away from African tribal groups. That led to an increase in Arab raiding, which was deeply alarming to village leaders.

In the 1980s, Khartoum changed the administrative order by refusing to respect traditional tribal lines of authority. In recent years, they began disarming African villages, which were then completely vulnerable to attacks. One of the precipitating events was the storming of a police station by African villagers who were simply reclaiming their weapons to protect themselves. That act was soon replicated throughout Darfur.

In February 2003, Darfur exploded, and Khartoum was obliged to redeploy forces from the south. In military-to-military confrontations between Khartoum's regular forces and the Darfuri insurgents -- the Sudan Liberation Army (which is different from the Sudan People's Liberation Army, the southern movement) -- Khartoum began to lose badly. That was the beginning of its recruitment of the Janjaweed, who don't attack insurgents; they attack civilians. That's what they were hired to do.

How does the civil war in the south relate to the situation in Darfur?

They are both responses to central tyranny, but they are not directly related. In the catastrophe in southern Sudan, over 2 million lives were lost in 21 years of conflict, over 4 million are internally displaced and another half a million are refugees. The people of southern Sudan have long demanded the right of self-determination, including the right to secede from Sudan.

In Darfur, the issue isn't secession; it's greater autonomy, greater political and economic representation. The Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement are the two insurgency movements in Darfur. They are fighting against political and economic marginalization and for a secular democracy. The SLA is fighting to protect their people as the Arab militias attack African villages.

Why was the world so slow to react to the genocide?

In October 2002, the Sudan People's Liberation Army signed a cessation of hostilities agreement with Khartoum, and major fighting between the South and the North began to slow down. And on Jan. 9, 2005, the parties signed a comprehensive peace agreement.

The United States so wanted a peace agreement. If you look at the lack of commentary from the key Western negotiators in the North-South peace process -- Norway, the U.K. and the United States -- they were deliberately muting their criticism of Khartoum over its genocidal behavior in Darfur in order to get the North-South agreement completed.

Convinced that the West [really] wanted a North-South peace agreement, Khartoum [figured] that if they could string out a final agreement, the West wouldn't press them on Darfur. The signal Khartoum sent was: "Don't push us too hard on Darfur. We're not quite ready." In December 2003, the U.N. special envoy for humanitarian affairs reported that Khartoum was deliberately obstructing humanitarian aid to areas where the African population was concentrated. Yet, nobody else picked up on it, either inside or outside the U.N.

Back in January 2004, I would have conversations with my contact at USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] to figure out whether we inhabited the same moral universe as the people around us. It was mind-boggling. We could see what was happening in Darfur, and nobody else could see it. If they saw it, they'd have to react.

Have any of the six U.N. resolutions on Sudan had any effect?

No, and we need only look at the first of these, on July 30, 2004, which had only one demand in it: that Khartoum disarm the Janjaweed and bring its leaders to justice. There has been no progress whatsoever in terms of a response from the Khartoum regime. But beyond that, the Chinese permanent representative to the United Nations has made it clear China will veto any real sanctions measures against Khartoum. China is the dominant player in oil development and production in Sudan, and Sudan is China's premier source of offshore oil development.

What is the Bush administration's stance on the genocide?

Bush himself has publicly declared that what is going on in Darfur is genocide. But lately, there seems to be a very troubling policy to lowball the Darfur crisis. We began to see signs of it when [Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice had an extensive interview with the Washington Post at the end of March. She was asked repeatedly, "How many troops would be necessary to stop the genocide in Darfur?" Rice said she didn't know. Are we really to believe a woman as intelligent as Condoleezza Rice has no idea what an appropriate force is to stop genocide? Or is it that she didn't want to put a number on it, and subject that number to criticism?

Two weeks later, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick traveled to Khartoum. He pointedly refused to answer the question, "Is genocide still being committed in Darfur?" We already had an answer to that question by the State Department as well as Congress, in a unanimous, bipartisan, bicameral vote. Now the State Department is backing away from its earlier genocide determination, because it becomes more and more embarrassing the longer you declare it a genocide but don't do anything to stop it.

The State Department has issued a document estimating that 60,000 to 160,000 people have died in Darfur. That's an absolute scandal. It's not a mortality assessment; it's propaganda. The document does not provide a single citation or bibliographic reference, not one URL. There is no statistical analysis; there is nothing but bald assertion.

Among actual epidemiological studies of mortality, we have a consensus of 350,000 to 400,000. My most recent assessment has a figure of 400,000. I have written 12 full-scale analyses looking at every bit of data in the public domain, and a good deal from confidential sources, and that includes data from the World Health Organization, the Coalition for International Justice and USAID, as well as from my contacts at the U.N. and nongovernmental organizations.

The Darfur Accountability Act is hardly what you would call silver bullet legislation, but it does ask for serious things to be done. And as Nicholas Kristof wrote in a recent column in the New York Times, he has a letter in which the Bush administration talks about its desire that various provisions of the act be stripped out.

This is an extension of the view that we can't push the Khartoum regime too hard or we'll lose the North-South peace agreement. Khartoum sees right through it. It's the wrong signal to send.

When the U.S. declared the conflict in Darfur a genocide without the backing of the U.N., were we really committing ourselves to anything?

[Former Secretary of State] Colin Powell said no. He essentially said, "We find that it's genocide; we refer it to an obviously paralyzed U.N. Security Council. Genocide proceeds, but we've made our determination and our legal obligations end."

I would argue that there is ultimately a moral force that creates a legitimacy such that all actions that will stop the genocide are justified. That would include unilateral intervention. That's politically impossible, but the moral obligation is there, and it should take the form of working publicly to put pressure on the Europeans, NATO, the Arab League and Japan.

What are the short-term and long-term actions needed to resolve the crisis in Darfur?

We need immediate humanitarian intervention, with all the necessary military support, to protect civilians and aid operations that are increasingly at risk of being suspended. The only credible military assessments I've seen -- the ones that begin not with African Union capacity, or what's politically possible at the U.N. -- range from a low of 25,000 to a high of 60,000. The African Union has no mandate for civilian protection, and it has taken half a year to deploy 2,300 unequipped men. Any force must have an extremely robust mandate to protect civilians and humanitarian operations. It cannot be a monitoring mission, as the A.U. is.

You need to secure the perimeters of camps that have over 2 million people in them. You need to provide a way for people trapped in rural areas to try to get to camp areas. People are desperate to go back to their lands -- this is the planting season -- but they will not leave the camps unless they are provided security.

And the Janjaweed must be disarmed. If you look at those tasks, and you ask what is required to address them, you're talking about a force of six to seven brigades of NATO-quality troops, assuming a brigade of 6,000.

Finally, for the next year, as people move back to their homes, we are going to need to ramp up emergency transitional aid. If we don't, we risk this peace falling apart before it has a chance to take hold. And yet, the U.S. appropriation for emergency transitional aid has been negligible.

What other actions should the U.S. take at this point?

The United States has comprehensive economic and trade sanctions against Sudan. No American businesses are operational within Sudan, but many European and Asian companies that do business with the regime trade on the New York Stock Exchange. That fact has become much more salient in recent weeks, and there is a booming divestment campaign on campuses and among state legislatures directed at clearing investment portfolios of holdings in these companies. Only foreign investment makes it possible for this regime to survive and commit genocide. But there is no sign that the Bush administration is prepared to countenance capital-market sanctions.

Are there any reasons for optimism at this stage?

In Security Council Resolution 1590, passed in March, the U.N. committed to a peace support operation for southern Sudan of 10,700 personnel, including roughly 900 observers. But there is no civilian protection mandate and no mandate to stop the fighting initiated by the Khartoum-backed militias in southern Sudan. (The cease-fire agreement of 2002 has largely held, but there have been many violations, and many of these have targeted civilians.) Going forward, the greatest threat to the North-South peace agreement is the threat of military assault by these militias.

I am hopeful that the comprehensive peace agreement of Jan. 9 will hold -- not because I have any confidence in the Khartoum regime but because I think they miscalculated. I don't think they expected that the U.N. peace operation would have a chance to deploy.

If war resumes in southern Sudan, it will be because Khartoum concludes that too much has been given away in the peace agreement, calculating that it's better to resume the war before peace really has a chance to take hold. It's an all-or-nothing state of affairs right now. If [the war] resumes, it will be hell on earth.

Meanwhile, Darfur has captured the attention of a great many people. I don't know how it happened. I've been working on Sudan for six years now, and at the beginning my main frustration was not being able to interest college students in Sudan. Now, I lecture constantly on college campuses. Just look at the number of Darfur Web sites, the number of prominent pieces published on Darfur. I think Congress' determination that this was genocide was very significant.

But is it too little, too late?

Yes and no. If I'm right that 400,000 people have died, how can we not be too late? The question, though, is too late for what? Jan Egeland, the head of the U.N.'s humanitarian office, estimated in December 2004 that if humanitarian operations were forced to suspend their operations -- and some have -- monthly mortality could be as great as 100,000 civilians. If that occurs, we're going to surpass the Rwandan genocide total before the end of the year. That, it seems to me, would be an even greater failure.

I was lecturing at Bowdoin College the other night, and I told the students that I have this fantasy about going to Darfur: I look into the eyes of a little girl there, and I'm told by those who know that she is the last child who would have died a genocidal death but for the efforts that finally, finally stopped the genocide. We've already failed, but she is the measure of our success.
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posted in Sudan - 0 replies

do something...but what?

acoustichrmny — Thu, 05 May 2005 16:06:50 GMT

http://motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/05/darfur_intervention.html
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There are two ways to look at Darfur. There's the raw graphic encounter, first of all. Click over to the website of Brian Steidle, a former U.S. Marine, who contracted with the African Union monitoring team in Darfur and took hundreds pictures of the devastation there. See the children with their backs torn open by bullets. See the villages torched and strafed by government gunships. See the refugees crammed into camps, parched and starving. A few minutes of this is enough to make one scream for someone, anyone, anyone at all to just do something.

And then there's the second way, to ask: "What exactly is to be done?" And here's where things get trickier. Last weekend the African Union took a long-awaited step forward on this front when it announced plans to bulk up its Darfur peacekeeping unit, from the woefully inadequate 2,300-strong force that was deployed last August, to 3,300 by May, and, it is hoped, 7,700 by the end of September. Even more importantly, the AU force will reportedly be granted a mandate to protect civilians in the region. Up until this point, peacekeepers have had authority only to monitor last April's ceasefire between the Khartoum government and the rebels, who have been fighting what they consider discrimination against ethnic African Muslims in Darfur. The AU had to watch helplessly as the truce was repeatedly violated and villages were sacked by both government forces and the government-backed janjaweed Arab horseback militias. Meanwhile, the U.S. plans to shell out an extra $50 to $60 million to support the expanded AU force, and NATO will "consider" providing logistical help.

This doesn't mean the cavalry has finally arrived. The African Union has been dragging its feet on intervention for months, despite growing evidence that Khartoum and the Arab janjaweed militias are engaged in genocide against the people of Darfur, along with a humanitarian crisis that has killed an estimated 400,000 civilians, and has left nearly 3 million refugees near the Sudan-Chad border in need of aid. Still, last October, leaders from Nigeria, Libya, and Chad called the mess in Darfur a "purely African question" and then sat by cynically and did nothing. As the Congressional Research Service pointed out in its report last month: "Many members of the African Union do not share the view that a genocide is occurring in Darfur and still consider the government of Sudan as the central player in the resolution of the conflict and protector of civilians." Indeed, there's no guarantee that the AU will even follow through with their latest proposed expansion, which is precisely why so many liberal interventionists would prefer not to leave Darfur in African hands.

In an ideal world, of course, letting Africans handle Darfur would be the best option. If they could handle it. But it's doubtful that even the bulked-up AU deployment will be able to avert the worst of the crisis, which is the main concern here. The new AU troops won't be ready until September, at the earliest, which means four more months of inaction, four more months of starvation and massacres, four more months of increased body counts. The rainy season will soon get underway in Darfur, which will deepen the crisis, hampering aid delivery and spreading contagious diseases, creating what aid groups called "a logistical nightmare" last summer.

More to the point, few experts seriously think that 7,700 troops will be able to secure a region the size of France, deter the janjaweed militias, secure all humanitarian corridors to and within Darfur, and provide refugees safe passage back to their villages. Jan Pronk, the UN's envoy to the region, has said at least 12,300 troops will be needed, while the UN's Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland has said at least 10,000. But both men have assumed that no non-AU forces will ever be forthcoming, so their estimates are tailored to what is feasible within these constraints. In order to actually restore peace in Darfur, Marine Capt. Brian Steidle, who had some success helping the AU deter janjaweed attacks in South Darfur, has said that up to 25,000 to 50,000 troops would be needed to protect villages and allow Darfuris to return home. And Gen. Romeo Dallaire, head of the UN Peacekeeping Force during the genocide in Rwanda, has estimated that up to 44,000 may be needed.

Moreover, it's not clear that an AU force of any size, even with "logistical support" from NATO, would be able to stop the janjaweed or the Sudanese security forces from massacring civilians in Darfur and harassing aid workers. The AU has not spelled out rules of engagement for confronting the militias, and, moreover it is a certainty that the peacekeeping force will not be authorized to engage Sudanese security forces, despite the fact that the latter have been just as thoroughly involved in the slaughter. In this case, Khartoum can continue integrating the janjaweed into its police and army forces, as it has been doing for months now, and continue its war against the Darfur rebel groups unimpeded. There is also no back-up plan in case Khartoum refuses to allow an expanded AU presence into Darfur.

But if an AU deployment is appallingly ineffective, a Western intervention at this point looks both unrealistic and possibly dangerous. The UN Security Council could, in theory, put in an expanded civilian protection force into Darfur, possibly deploying peacekeepers from other African and Muslim countries. But China—which imports six percent of its oil from Sudan, and has a controlling stake in various Sudanese oil companies—would likely veto any such intervention. Likewise, NATO could step in, but for the fact that France has opposed such a move, arguing that the organization should not be "the gendarme of the world." And other Arab countries have also declined to get involved; Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, for instance, has denounced any possible "internationalization" of the conflict.

For its part, the Bush administration no longer seems willing to put pressure on its allies over Darfur; over the past few weeks the State Department has shied away from calling the situation a "genocide," a word that Colin Powell had been hurling around with authority last year. More recently, Mark Leon Goldberg of the American Prospect reported that the White House was trying to thwart the Darfur Accountability Act from passing Congress, an act which would accelerate AU deployment, authorize an expansion of the UN peacekeeping force, slap sanctions on Khartoum, and use international airpower to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur and prevent Sudanese gunships from strafing villages. One possible explanation for the shift: The Los Angeles Times' Ken Silverstein reported last week that the U.S. appears to be gaining valuable counterterrorism support from, among other things, Sudan's intelligence chief Salan Abdallah Gosh, who happens to be overseeing the genocidal war against Darfur.

Even if the will did exist in the United States and Europe, however, intervention in Sudan could still have grave consequences. For starters, any mission that aimed the violence would require enforcing a no-fly zone over Darfur. But according to Eric Reeves, a Smith professor who has been covering the conflict extensively, the logistical difficulties here are very high: "Chad is the only realistic basing option, and neither the French nor [Chadian] President Idriss Deby gives the slightest sign of being willing to accept the required US or UK aerial combat forces." It would be near impossible, moreover, to patrol for the countless helicopter gunships swarming the area. And Sudan would certainly be capable of defending its airspace with its fleet of advanced Chinese and Russian fighter jets. Enforcing a true no-fly zone could involve air combat, or forcibly disabling Khartoum's air force, and either move would be severely provocative. Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail has already said that his country will resist any outside interference, "by force if necessary."

Indeed, any serious Western intervention risks escalating the conflict in Sudan, which could easily lead to Sudanese attacks on UN peacekeepers or, worse, an outright expulsion of the 10,000 humanitarian workers currently delivering food and aid through the Western regions. (There have already been multiple reports of janjaweed militiamen and Sudanese security forces attacking these aid workers.) Forceful engagement of Khartoum's Arab forces, moreover, would almost surely be denounced by Islamists, perhaps turning Darfur into a second front for jihadis across the Middle East to come fight the West. And most critically, Western intervention in Darfur could provoke the central government into abandoning the recently-signed and still-fragile peace treaty between Khartoum and southern Sudan, which ended the country's 20-year civil war. This is not to say that intervention is wrong—the moral case for intervening in Darfur is, quite frankly, overwhelming—but the risks are very steep.

Hardly a wonder, then, that many observers would prefer to let the African Union handle things. But there is no reason to think the AU can prevent the dying in Darfur from stretching on indefinitely. The calls to "do something" will continue, even as no one quite knows what, exactly, to do.

Bradford Plumer is the assistant editor of the Mother Jones website.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

conflict in children's eyes

acoustichrmny — Thu, 05 May 2005 04:39:24 GMT

http://hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/
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The Drawings

Human Rights Watch researchers Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault visited Chad in February 2005 to assess the issues of protection and sexual violence in the refugee camps along the Darfur/Chad border. In her work as a pediatrician, Dr. Sparrow habitually asks children to draw while she talks to their parents or guardians. She did the same thing in Darfur. While Bercault and Sparrow spoke with parents, teachers, and camp leaders, the children drew. Without any instruction or guidance, the children drew scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur: the attacks by the Janjaweed, the bombings by Sudanese government forces, the shootings, the burning of entire villages, and the flight to Chad.

As Sparrow and Bercault visited schools in refugee camps in Chad, many children between the ages of 8 and 17 shared the drawings they had done in their school notebooks, often alongside their lessons in Arabic or math. Schoolchildren from seven refugee camps and the border town of Tine offered Human Rights Watch’s researchers hundreds of drawings in the hope that the rest of the world would see their stories as described in their own unique visual vocabulary of war.

posted in Sudan - 1 reply

darfur accountability act

acoustichrmny — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 04:20:41 GMT

Corzine Measure On Darfur Passes Senate

POSTED: 10:48 am EDT April 22, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate on Thursday unanimously passed a measure sponsored by Sen. Jon Corzine demanding that the genocide in the war-ravaged Darfur region in Sudan be stopped. The Senate also approved a Corzine amendment adding $90 million for humanitarian aid to the region.

"We will continue to raise this issue until the killings stop," said Corzine, D-N.J. "Today's milestone brings us closer to that goal."

Corzine, along with Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, has spearheaded measures regarding Darfur in the Senate. Corzine said his interest in Darfur is one everyone should share.

"If we are committed to saying never again with regard to the killing fields of Cambodia or the genocide of Rwanda, or even the kinds of actions that took place in World War II, we need to react to what is happening now," Corzine said. "We can't have a review of our actions and history showing that we stood on the sidelines when we could have taken a stand on a moral issue."

Corzine visited Darfur last year and plans to go to the region again next week.

The Darfur Accountability Act calls for sanctions against the Sudan and the establishment of a special presidential envoy to the region, Corzine added. Similar legislation is pending in the House of Representatives.

The Darfur conflict began after two non-Arab rebel groups took up arms against the Arab-dominated government in February 2003 to win more political and economic rights for the region's African tribes.

Sudan's government is accused of responding by backing the Janjaweed militia in a campaign of wide-scale abuses, including rape and killings, against Sudanese of African origin. The government denies backing the Janjaweed.

The United Nations has called Darfur the world's worst humanitarian crisis. An estimated 180,000 people have died in the upheaval and about 2 million others have been displaced since the conflict began.

© 2005 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

posted in Sudan - 4 replies

sudan becomes us ally

acoustichrmny — Sun, 01 May 2005 19:50:08 GMT

Sudan Becomes US Ally in 'War on Terror'
By Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian UK
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/050105Y.shtml
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Saturday 30 April 2005

Sudan's Islamist regime, once shunned by Washington for providing a haven for Osama bin Laden as well as for human rights abuses during decades of civil war, has become an ally in the Bush administration's "war on terror".

Only months after the US accused Khartoum of carrying out genocide in Darfur, Sudan has become a crucial intelligence asset to the CIA.

In the Middle East and Africa, Sudan's agents have penetrated networks that would not normally be accessible to America, one former US intelligence official told the Guardian. Some of that cooperation has spilled over into the war in Iraq: Sudan is credited with detaining foreign militants on their way to join anti-American fighters there.

Sudanese agents have also helped the CIA to monitor Islamist organisations in Somalia.

"The intelligence relationship is the strongest thread between Washington and Khartoum," the official said. "Khartoum is probably the only government in the Arab League that has contributed in a major way to the protection of US forces and citizens in Iraq."

News of the growing cooperation was first reported in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. The paper traced the thaw in relations since 2001 to a milestone last week: the visit to Washington by Sudan's intelligence chief, Salah Abdallah Gosh. It reported that Sudan's secret police had begun to crack down on suspected Islamists, had shared evidence with the FBI and allowed US personnel to interrogate al-Qaida suspects.

In May 2003, Sudanese security forces raided a suspected terrorist training camp and deported more than a dozen, mainly Saudi, militants to Arab states which work closely with US intelligence services, the newspaper said.

Yet a decade ago Sudan was a haven to Bin Laden and other international outlaws, such as Carlos the Jackal. In 1993, it was placed on the US state department's list of terrorist regimes. Approaches from Khartoum were rebuffed - even as it offered its services against an emerging al-Qaida in the 1990s.

"Sudan tried to hand over two guys implicated in the 1998 bombing of the US embassies in east Africa, and the response was to send cruise missiles to hit the aspirin factory in Khartoum," the official said. "They offered up Bin Laden in 1995, and we said we don't even have an indictment on him."

Officially, Washington's position towards Sudan remains unchanged. "Sudan is still considered a state sponsor of terror," a state department spokesman said yesterday.

News of General Gosh's visit to Washington caused consternation in human rights circles. The general is among 51 Sudanese officials implicated in human rights abuses by the international criminal court.

"I quite understand that the war on terrorism means dealing with bad actors, but to fly in one of Sudan's chief committers of what Washington has formally described as genocide is deeply disturbing," said an independent Sudan analyst, Eric Reeves. He noted there had been signs of a slight thaw towards Khartoum for some time - despite the state department's official stance.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

nato poised for involvement in darfur

acoustichrmny — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 16:40:56 GMT

Nato poised for first African engagement in Darfur
By Stephen Castle in Brussels
28 April 2005
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=633665
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Nato is on the verge of its first mission in sub-Saharan Africa, after the African Union turned to the transatlantic alliance for logistical help for its monitoring operations in Sudan's conflict-ravaged Darfur region.

Within hours of receiving the request, Nato's ambassadors gave the go-ahead for talks on how it can help assist the AU's observation mission and discussions will start "as soon as possible", Nato said.

There is no prospect of alliance soldiers being committed to the operation, which will probably focus on providing transport and other technical needs.

Nato involvement has been encouraged by the US, which pressed the case at a recent meeting of the alliance's foreign ministers in Vilnius, Lithuania, in the face of French resistance. France has already sent a deployment in the region. The African sub-continent had been seen as an obvious sphere of operations for the EU's new military force which mounted a mission to Congo two years ago.

One French idea for Darfur was that its logistical support and air surveillance operation, based in Chad, might be turned into an EU military mission. That prospect seems less likely following yesterday morning's written request to Nato from Alpha Oumar Konare, the chairman of the AU Commission, who is expected to visit the alliance's Brussels headquarters next month.

James Appathurai, Nato's chief spokesman, said: "What has to be decided is what the AU needs and what is already provided and whether Nato can add value.But certainly this is the first time Nato would be engaged in any significant way in sub-Saharan Africa." The Sudanese government insists only African troops can be involved in intervention and other Nato and EU diplomats are frustrated by the limited progress made by the AU. "It is a question of choosing the most appropriate organisation for the operation," one official said.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than two million have fled their homes during the last two years of violence in Darfur involving Arab militias, non-Arab rebels and Sudanese government forces in the province.

The deployment of more than 2,000 African Union peace monitors has helped calm the situation in some areas. But the force remains small relative to its task, and its mandate is limited, preventing it from enforcing the peace. It is likely, however, that the AU force will be given a stronger mandate to protect civilians who are under threat.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

stop genocide, secure peace

acoustichrmny — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 16:44:01 GMT

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=klLWJcP7H&b=100385&action=2090&template=x.ascx
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Stop Genocide, Secure Peace in Darfur

April 5, 2005
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Tomorrow, April 6, 2005, will be the 11th anniversary of the beginning of the Rwandan genocide. After that tragedy, many world leaders pledged to "never again" allow such a ghastly genocide. Yet today, in the Darfur region of Sudan, a similar human catastrophe is being perpetrated in plain view of the world community. The pledge of "never again" rings hollow for the people of Darfur who are still waiting for someone to protect them from a government-sponsored terror campaign.

Last July Congress passed unanimous resolutions condemning the genocide in Darfur and calling on President Bush to lead an international effort to stop the killing. On September 9, 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell confirmed that "genocide had occurred and may still be occurring" in Darfur.

Now over two hundred days have passed since Secretary Powell's testimony and during that time at least 60,000 people have died of disease or starvation. Many thousands more have been slaughtered in brutal attacks by government-sponsored militias. Since the Darfur conflict began, as many as 300,000 people have been killed by murder, disease, or starvation.

In order to address this urgent crisis, Senator Jon Corzine and Senator Sam Brownback have recently introduced the Darfur Accountability Act (S.495), a bipartisan bill that would take concrete steps to restore peace and security there.

No crisis in the world represents a greater challenge to our moral values than the genocide in Darfur. Act now to help the victims of this tragedy and end their ongoing nightmare. Write your representatives today and tell them to support the Darfur Accountability Act (S.495).

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

promises to keep

acoustichrmny — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 22:54:37 GMT

Billions of Promises to Keep
By KOFI A. ANNAN
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/13/opinion/13annan.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
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THIS is a make-or-break year for Sudan, Africa's biggest country. In Oslo this week, donor countries pledged $4.5 billion in aid to Sudan, but while I applaud the donors' generosity, promises alone are not enough.

Time is running out for the people of Sudan. We need pledges immediately converted into cash and more protection forces in Darfur to prevent yet more death and suffering. If we fail in Sudan, the consequences of our actions will haunt us for years to come.

After more than two million dead, four million uprooted, and 21 years of warfare, southern Sudan is at last on the threshold of peace. It is, of course, a volatile, fragile peace. Violence, disease and displacement are still daily realities in this desperately impoverished region, where one in four children die before the age of 5, nearly half of all children are malnourished, and only 5 out of 100 girls attend primary school.

Peace will not be easily consolidated in such an environment. Nor will it come on the cheap. Indeed, roughly half all countries that emerge from civil war lapse back into violence within five years. International support is urgently needed to help Sudan weather the rocky transition from war to peace.

The needs are many - and immediate. More than three million civilians, displaced by violence, can now return to southern Sudan and rebuild their lives. Two million of them need food aid. If people are not fed, if former soldiers are not reintegrated or retrained, peace will quickly unravel.

The billions pledged this week can help. But hungry people cannot eat pledges. Through long and bitter experience we've learned that donor pledges often remain unfulfilled. In Cambodia, Rwanda, Liberia and elsewhere, a large percentage of promised funds failed to materialize, and many lives were lost as a result.

For example, in 1992, donors pledged $880 million for Cambodian war rehabilitation; three years later, only $460 million had been delivered. Nearly a year after donors promised $1 billion to deal with the devastation caused by the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, less than 20 percent of the money had been delivered.

Clearly, we must do better in Sudan. I urge donors to convert their generous pledges into cash without delay. And I urge the public to hold them accountable for their promises. This time, let us keep our commitments, and not turn a blind eye to a whole generation of Sudanese who have earned this peace and desperately need it.

In Darfur, rations at camps already have been cut - and soon Sudan's rainy season will begin, making aid more difficult and costly to deliver. In a matter of weeks we will run out of food for two million people.

No one really knows how many people have died in Darfur since the conflict began, but some analysts estimate it could be 300,000 or more. If the situation deteriorates further, up to four million people - two-thirds of Darfur's population - may need food aid by summer's end.

But more than food aid is needed - we also need to hold the perpetrators of violence in Sudan accountable. The International Commission of Inquiry, which I appointed at the request of the United Nations Security Council, has amply documented the murder, mass rapes, abductions and other atrocities committed in Darfur, as have many others. We know what is happening in Darfur. The question is, why are we not doing more to put an end to it?

Last summer, the Security Council, the United States and the European Union all said Darfur was their top priority. But it was only last month that the Security Council agreed to impose sanctions on people who commit violations of international law in Darfur and, in a historic first, to refer the situation in Darfur to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, thus taking a critical step toward ending the prevailing climate of impunity. Last week I handed the prosecutor the sealed list of those identified by the Commission of Inquiry.

While we are grateful to African leaders for their contributions thus far, we need thousands more - and not today or tomorrow but yesterday.

After all, giving aid without protection is like putting a Band-Aid on an open wound. Unarmed aid workers, while vitally necessary, cannot defend civilians from murder, rape or violent attack. Our collective failure to provide a much larger force is as pitiful and inexcusable as the consequences are grave for the tens of thousands of families who are left unprotected.

We saw this all too well in Bosnia a decade ago. Back then, Bosnian civilians watched the aid trucks continue to roll while their neighbors were gunned-down in full daylight. "We will die with our stomachs full," they used to say. Are we now going to stand by and watch a replay in Darfur?

I also urge all those with influence over the warring parties to persuade them to return quickly to the negotiating table and agree on a political settlement.

In this watershed year for Sudan, it is vital that the international community move speedily to provide the resources to consolidate a fragile peace in the south, and to protect civilians from recurring violence in Darfur. We know what we need: money to help win the peace in the south, more African Union boots on the ground to help end the atrocities in Darfur, and political pressure to settle the conflict. It's that simple, and that essential.

Kofi A. Annan is the secretary general of the United Nations.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

donors must boost protection

acoustichrmny — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 23:09:56 GMT

Sudan: Donors Must Boost Protection Force in Darfur
After North-South Conflict, Reconstruction Aid Must Prioritize Rights Protection
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http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/04/08/darfur10442_txt.htm
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(Oslo, April 8, 2005) — At the international donors conference on Sudan that opens Monday in Oslo, donor governments must fund urgent protection measures for civilians in Darfur’s ongoing conflict, Human Rights Watch said today. At the same time, donors should make human rights protections and the rule of law central to aid for reconstruction after the country’s 21-year civil war in the south, Human Rights Watch said.

At the conference, which Norway is convening on April 11-12, the United States, European Union countries and other donor governments will pledge support for post-conflict reconstruction in Sudan. The conference follows the signing in January of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), an accord that ended the conflict between Khartoum and southern based rebels. Donors will also discuss the situation in Darfur and the international response so far.

“Donors discussing post-war aid for Sudan must also fund immediate measures to end the ongoing atrocities in Darfur,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director of Human Rights Watch. “Real peace in Sudan will only come if donors help provide urgently needed protection for civilians in Darfur.”

While the Security Council referral of the situation of Darfur to the International Criminal Court is an excellent step that should lead to a reduction in abuses, more international military presence is required in Darfur to protect civilians and assist them to return to their homes and farms.

Donor governments and the United Nations must take immediate steps to prevent the consolidation of ethnic cleansing, which would leave some two million Darfurians without their homes, land and property. Currently confined to camps, almost two million victims of ethnic cleansing remain dependent on the international community for food, aid and other humanitarian assistance. Lacking adequate protection, they continue to encounter threats from government-backed Janjaweed militias, and government and security forces and are unable to return home.

“The current situation for civilians in Darfur is unacceptable. They need immediate protection from ongoing attacks so they can return home and begin to rebuild their lives,” said Takirambudde. “Donors should immediately provide support for an expanded African Union protection mission.”

Funding is also needed to increase the number of U. N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights monitors in Darfur. The mandate of the human rights monitoring mission in Sudan should clearly include monitoring, documentation and regular public reporting.

Human Rights Watch further urged that justice, the rule of law and accountability be central to the reconstruction efforts in Sudan. An independent and impartial justice system and accountability mechanisms, as well as south-south reconciliation and active participation of civil society in the new government of the South, are key requirements for the post-conflict transition.

“The Sudanese people have suffered from decades of armed conflict and repression,” said Takirambudde. “Ensuring protection of human rights and accountability for past atrocities should be high on the donors’ list of priorities.”

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Genocide Intervention Fund

johnpowers — Sat, 12 Mar 2005 04:58:31 GMT

Samantha Power was interviewed on PBS "Now" this evening. One of the questions was about the difference in public response to the tsunami and the genocide in the Sudan. Power made the point about the difficulty that people have in relating to the crisis in Sudan whereas she though people could relate to a natural disaster. She also mentioned how people were told ways that they can help with tsunami relief.

So the interviewer pressed Power questioning, "What can we do?" And she responded about Swarthmore College students starting a Genocide Intervention Fund. She made clear that this isn't "the" answer rather there are many things people outside the Sudan can do. Here's a link to an article on the GIF http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2005-03-03/news/14769

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

new atrocities as security council dithers

acoustichrmny — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 21:45:03 GMT

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/02/25/darfur10212_txt.htm
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Darfur: New Atrocities as Security Council Dithers
(New York, February 25, 2005) — New eyewitness accounts from Darfur of rapes, torture and mutilation by government-backed militias underscore how the U.N. Security Council must take urgent action to protect civilians and punish the perpetrators, Human Rights Watch said today.

Last week, eyewitnesses in South Darfur told Human Rights Watch how government-backed Janjaweed militia attacked villages in the Labado area in December and January, and singled out young women and girls for rape. Male relatives who protested were beaten, stripped naked, tied to trees and forced to watch the rape of the women and girls. In some cases, the men were then branded with a hot knife as a mark of their humiliation.

In violation of the April ceasefire agreement and a November 9 commitment to cease hostile aerial activity in Darfur, the Sudanese government in mid-December 2004 used Antonov aircraft, Mi-24 helicopter gunships and Janjaweed militia to attack the civilian population in the Ishma and Labado areas of South Darfur. Thousands of people were forced to flee their homes. On the outskirts of the South Darfur state capital Nyala, the sound of bombs exploding in Labado and Ishma were heard all day on December 17.

In mid-January, Sudanese government aircraft and Janjaweed forces also attacked Hamada, another village in South Darfur, reportedly killing more than 100 civilians. Both offensives appear to have targeted civilians as well as rebel bases in areas under the control of Darfur’s two main rebel movements, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).

“The Sudanese government talks peace at the U.N., but then orders airstrikes and militia raids against its own people in Darfur,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The Security Council risks losing its relevance unless it finally takes meaningful steps to stop the atrocities in Darfur.”

Human Rights Watch said that the U.N. Security Council must take immediate action to protect Darfur’s civilians, who suffer ongoing atrocities while the 15 members of the Security Council stall on effective measures to end abuse.

For a third week, Security Council members are discussing a new resolution that will authorize a U.N. “peace support” force of 10,000 personnel to monitor the peace agreement ending the 21-year civil war between the Sudanese government and the main southern-based rebel movement, the Sudan People's Liberation Army.

The draft resolution, which focuses on southern Sudan, provides little relief for civilians suffering from the armed conflict that is now devastating Darfur. The resolution would impose only travel sanctions and asset freezes on yet to be designated individuals for their involvement in human rights abuses, and extend an arms embargo on the Sudanese government’s arms shipments to Darfur.

“Increasing the international protection force in Darfur is urgently needed to stop the violence,” Takirambudde said. “The Security Council can ensure prosecution of grave crimes by referring Darfur to the International Criminal Court; this would deter the Sudanese authorities from committing even more atrocities.”

The African Union, which currently has a ceasefire monitoring force of approximately 1,800 personnel on the ground in Darfur, remains mainly based in the state capitals and larger towns of Darfur. It lacks sufficient numbers of armed troops to adequately patrol and investigate ongoing violations in the rural areas.

After the December attack in Labado, a small AU force moved into the burned and destroyed town, which allowed some civilians to return. Despite the AU presence in Labado, Janjaweed activity in the area continued as recently as February 16. Militia forces disrupted humanitarian relief efforts on the main roads by shooting at vehicles and returned to burned villages to destroy any remaining infrastructure. The Janjaweed forces were believed to be partly acting to prevent civilians from returning to their home areas.

"With so few troops in Darfur, the AU force today simply cannot protect civilians,” said Takirambudde. “The United Nations must work with the African Union to come up with a plan to vastly increase the force in Darfur."

Human Rights Watch called on the African Union to urgently increase their deployment to the rural areas of Darfur, aggressively patrol the main roads and smaller rural villages and proactively protect civilians from the ongoing abuses, including rape, torture and murder.

Meanwhile, as the Sudanese government's offensives in December and January, aid agencies working in South Darfur came under increasing harassment from government officials and rebel groups. In January, staff from several international non-governmental organizations were detained by government officials often based on unfounded allegations. Aid workers have also been detained by rebel movements in Darfur, most recently in mid February.

Members of the international media and human rights groups have also found it increasingly difficult to acquire visas for Sudan and Darfur, an indication of the Sudanese government's efforts to reduce international exposure of its “ethnic cleansing” campaign in Darfur.

"The Sudanese government has long closed off regions where it's committing massive abuses, but in Darfur last year it was forced to open its doors to media and human rights monitors," Takirambudde said. "Now it's trying to close that window by intimidating aid agencies and refusing visas to journalists.”

Human Rights Watch said that the largest rebel group in Darfur, the Sudan Liberation Army, has also been responsible for attacks on civilians, particularly in January around the South Darfur town of Malam. Human Rights Watch called on the rebel movements to respect civilians and civilian infrastructure and to cease attacks on humanitarian workers and convoys.

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warlord:sudan ordered death squads

acoustichrmny — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:20:43 GMT

Sudan ordered death squads, says warlord
By Meera Selva, Africa Correspondent
03 March 2005
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=616285
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A powerful Sudanese sheikh, widely regarded as a senior leader of the Janjaweed militia, has said that the Sudanese government in Khartoum asked him to supply fighters to attack civilians in Darfur.

Musa Hilal, described the by the US State Department as a Janjaweed co-ordinator, said the government had asked him to mobilise the 300,000 tribesmen he claims to be responsible for. In an interview with Human Rights Watch, he said: "The government has told us to mobilise people. We've gone to the people to tell them to join the PDF [militia] and defend your country, defend the land, defend the country's most important things, and that you have to fight for your survival and the country's stability."

The Sudanese government has always said the violence in Darfur was caused by ancient tribal rivalries, and that it had never encouraged or supported one side over the other. It has also promised repeatedly to disarm the militias in Darfur and blamed the continuing violence in the region on its inability to bring the groups under control.

But Mr Hilal said the government had the ability to disarm the PDF - a paramilitary group that is part of the Janjaweed - if it chose to do so. He said: "They [The government] are the ones that gave the PDF guns. They're the ones that recruited the PDF; they're the ones that pay their salaries; they give them their ID cards. They can disarm them or they can leave them alone; that's the government's concern."

He added that the army had been responsible for attacks against civilians, saying: "All of the people in the field are led by top army commanders ... These people get their orders from the western command centre, and from Khartoum."

Mr Hilal has been jailed twice; once in 1997 for attacking 17 Africans in Darfur. Sudan's Vice-President, Ali Uthman Muhammad Taha, is believed to have intervened to release him from prison. US and UN investigators have said they believe Mr Taha has played a major role in orchestrating attacks in Darfur.

Mr Hilal denies having taken part in any of Janjaweed attacks, but several eyewitnesses claim to have seen him addressing crowds of militiamen in marketplaces and urging them on to victory. Others say Mr Hilal has taken several women as prisoners and held them at Jebel Jur near his military camps in Misteriya, north Darfur.

Another group of women who were trying to return to their home, a two-and-a-half hour donkey ride from Misteriya, say their Arab former neighbours told them: "This is the land of Musa Hilal. You must not go and take anything from there."

Human Rights Watch says it has obtained Sudanese government documents that ask local security units not to interfere with the men under Mr Hilal's control. Peter Takirambudde, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Africa division said: "Musa Hilal squarely contradicts the government's claims that it has 'no relationship' with local militias."

The US said last year that it believed the violence in Darfur constituted genocide, and it wants to set up an international war crimes tribunal, such as those set up for the former Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide, to try senior leaders such as Mr Hilal.

But a UN commission of inquiry concluded at the end of January that it did not believe that genocide had taken place in Darfur. Instead, it suggested that the attacks may be counted as "crimes against humanity, and recommended individuals responsible for the most serious should be tried by the International Criminal Court. However the UN inquiry refrained from naming suspects.

The Security Council has not yet decided how to deal with the commission's recommendation.

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darfur:washington battles against international justice

acoustichrmny — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 05:12:15 GMT

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/021905E.shtml
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Darfur: Washington Battles against International Justice
By Stéphanie Maupas and Claire Tréan
Le Monde

Thursday 17 February 2005

The United States does everything to avoid having the International Criminal Court deal with the violence in western Sudan.

All the associations for the defense of human rights would like the International Criminal Court (ICC) to try the Darfur case, as the UN commission on the Sudan recommended in its February 1 report to the Security Council, in the hope that the prosecution of those responsible for the crimes committed in this region "would contribute to the restoration of peace."

For non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as for the European countries which have supported their request, the Darfur case, in view of the exactions that have been perpetrated there, corresponds very precisely to that for which the International Court was created, that is, to put an end to the impunity of the authors of the most serious crimes. That seriousness has been confirmed by the UN commission, which talks about "crimes against humanity" in its report.

Universal Vocation

An ICC seizure of jurisdiction by the Security Council would, moreover, have constituted the court's consecration in the eyes of human rights militants, the first official acknowledgement of its universal vocation. Darfur is one of the cases that the ICC cannot try on its own, on the sole initiative of its prosecutor, since the Sudan did not adhere to the treaty which created the Court. In such cases, the Security Council only may mandate the ICC. If it were to do that in the name of the entire international community, it would confirm the legitimacy of the international jurisdiction against all those who have refused to accept it, beginning with the United States, which has indulged itself in an out and out war against the ICC for several years.

The NGOs were able to hope for a while that they would be victorious. The Americans were, in fact, the first to officially describe the events at Darfur as "genocide," which in international law requires prosecution. Caught in the trap of this language that it could not leave without a follow-up, wouldn't the US be forced to cede to the Europeans' demand to empower the Court, or at least to let them do it, by limiting itself to an abstention in the Security Council?

That was underestimating the American Administration's hostility to the ICC. For several weeks, animated secret negotiations have been taking place between the capitals and in the corridors of the UN Security Council. The NGOs work the Europeans tirelessly to keep them on track and the Americans reject any concession, reopening one of the conflicts in the heart of Atlantic relations that George Bush's passage to his second term has not been sufficient to eliminate.

In order to find a way out of this transatlantic controversy, Great Britain at one point imagined a compromise that made the NGOs shudder. Britain suggested that the United States renounce its veto in the Security Council opposing the Court taking legal jurisdiction over Darfur, in exchange for which the Council would guarantee in substance that American soldiers in foreign operations would escape the ICC's jurisdiction. This immunity of jurisdiction for its citizens is what the United States has obstinately sought for several years: by way of blackmail and pressure, the US concludes bilateral agreements with states stipulating that American citizens may not be the object of a transfer to the ICC; twice, in 2002 and 2003, the US wrested a one-year declaration from the Security Council guaranteeing immunity during that year to personnel participating in operations mandated by the UN. These declarations infringe on the ICC's status; in July 2004 (after the scandal of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq) the Europeans rebelled and the Council refused to subscribe to the American demand.

The idea of a compromise advanced by the British with regard to Darfur provoked protests by NGOs like the International Federation for Human Rights (IFHR), which, in one of its recent communiqués, called on Security Council members not to indulge themselves in such a bargain, definitively prejudicial to the ICC. However, in any case, the United States was not ready to agree even to this proposed arrangement: at no price does it want the Security Council to confer legal jurisdiction on the ICC.

Campaign of Denigration

Consequently, the conflict remains open, and, if the proposed resolution on Darfur that the United States is circulating at this moment in the Security Council says that criminals must be prosecuted, it does not say by whom. The proposal Washington has advanced in recent weeks continues to run up against Europeans' opposition on this point. The United States suggests that a new ad hoc tribunal be established (on the model of those in The Hague for the former Yugoslavia and in Arusha for Rwanda) and that it would benefit from the logistics of the Arusha tribunal. Pursuing their campaign of denigration against the ICC, the Americans allow it to be understood that the latter resembles "a European court" and that an "African tribunal" would be preferable. To which the organization Human Rights Watch responded Wednesday, recalling that Africa had played a major role in the ICC's creation and that half the member countries of the African Union have ratified the treaty that created it.

European countries, for their part, point out that the Arusha tribunal is already over-taxed with Rwanda cases and that the Security Council (including the United States) has been recommending for several years that these two ad hoc tribunals, which are expensive, accelerate their work and close their doors more rapidly; finally, that the ICC's mission by definition is to substitute for all these ad hoc tribunals. That was the purpose for which it was created.
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Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.

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if not in darfur, then where

acoustichrmny — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 22:23:02 GMT

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5124670-110481,00.html
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If not in Darfur, then where?
US hostility to the international criminal court knows no bounds

Robin Cook
Friday February 11, 2005

Guardian

A commitment to an international criminal court was one of the changes for the better in foreign policy as a result of Labour's victory. Under the Conservatives, Britain had been a backmarker in negotiations to set up such a court. After the change of regime, Britain was propelled into the front rank of countries supporting an international system to bring to justice those guilty of crimes against humanity.
We mobilised support from other nations, and provided financial help for smaller, poorer states to send a delegation to the Rome conference at which the final package was put to the vote. It was approved with the support of 120 nations and the opposition of only half a dozen. That is as close as you get to consensus in the international community, even if the US was on the losing side.

The international criminal court ends the impunity of dictators who could kill thousands but not be held to account because they controlled their domestic courts. At the time I welcomed its creation as putting the Pol Pots of the future on notice that they would be brought to justice for crimes against their own citizens.

The gravest, most grotesque crimes against humanity since the international criminal court was set up are to be found in Darfur. The UN commission of inquiry has provided a compelling account of the harrowing brutality with which Sudanese forces are pursuing a strategy of ethnic cleansing, and concluded that the victims are "living a nightmare of violence and abuse". That nightmare has included men being dragged over the ground behind camels by a noose around their necks, women being kept naked in rape camps and girls as young as eight being violated.

The recommendations of the UN commission, though, have caused greater consternation in Washington than in Sudan. This is because its sensible conclusion is that the breaches of humanitarian law in Darfur should be referred to the institution specifically set up for such cases - the international criminal court.

For the past four years, the Bush administration has pursued a relentless pogrom against the court. Hostility to it has come to occupy a totemic role in its belief that US freedom of action must never be constrained by international jurisdiction. As a state department official expressed to a visiting European: "No US citizen is going to be tried by a Belgian", which raises doubts as to whether the Bush administration actually knows in which European country The Hague is located.

Now Condoleezza Rice has been using her contacts in Europe to lobby privately for the Darfur atrocities to be referred anywhere but the international criminal court. Apparently she has suggested that Darfur could be brought under the remit of the existing UN tribunal for the genocide in Rwanda. This is desperation. The only common feature between Darfur and Rwanda is that they are both in Africa. It is also irresponsible. The Rwanda tribunal is still struggling under an impossible workload and is in no position to provide an expeditious remedy to Darfur's continuing violence.

Alternatively, she has mooted that the UN could set up an entirely new tribunal, especially for Darfur. But it would take at least a year before any tribunal starting from scratch would have the staff, premises and procedures to get down to work. In the meantime, while the UN tried to accommodate the ideological antipathy of the Bush administration to the international criminal court, another 100,000 people would have been killed in Darfur. One of the six reasons cited by the UN commission for recommending the international criminal court was precisely that it could be activated immediately, without any delay.

Now ministers tell us they are looking for a way forward, but that will only be possible through agreement in the security council - in other words, with the US. But do they really believe that the Bush administration would have the gall to cast a US veto to block Darfur being committed to the international criminal court? Where would that leave all the warm mood music on freedom and justice with which George Bush punctuated his inaugural speech only last month? Come to that, where would it leave the impassioned pleas of Tony Blair for the world to address the plight of Africa as a scar on our conscience?

A US veto would be as embarrassing to Blair as it would be shaming to Bush. But just as embarrassing would be for Britain once again to be seen doing the rounds and trying to persuade the rest of the world to accept the Bush position and not to push the issue to a vote. The only way out with dignity is for Blair to call in some of the many debts that Bush owes him. This is the time when a candid friend should tell Bush to put the urgent need of the people of Darfur for justice before his own dogmatic hostility to the international criminal court.

r.cook@guardian.co.uk

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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us proposal for darfur tribunal

acoustichrmny — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 07:02:10 GMT

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/02/15/sudan10179_txt.htm
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U.S. Proposal for a Darfur Tribunal: Not an Effective Option to Ensure Justice

A U.N. Commission of Inquiry that the United States helped create recently found that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the “single best mechanism” and the “only credible way” of ensuring justice for Darfur’s victims. The U.N. Commission of Inquiry also detailed in depth in its report why other mechanisms would be inadvisable to bring justice for atrocities in Darfur. (See U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Why Alternatives to the ICC Are Inadvisable for Darfur for relevant excerpts from the report.) Because Sudan is not a party to the treaty establishing the ICC, a Security Council referral is needed for the court to prosecute crimes committed in Darfur.

Ignoring the commission’s strong recommendation that the Security Council immediately refer the situation in Darfur to the ICC, Washington has indicated that it opposes a Security Council referral because it does not “want to be party to legitimizing the ICC.” Instead it has proposed a new tribunal based in Tanzania administered by the United Nations and the African Union. The U.S. proposal may sound attractive on its face, with emphasis on encouraging “African ownership” and using an infrastructure “already in place” at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to “begin operating quickly.” However, upon closer scrutiny, the U.S. proposal for a new tribunal for Darfur simply does not present a viable option to effectively handle the challenges of ensuring justice for crimes committed in Darfur.

The U.S. Proposal Spells Delay, and Delay Means Death
The U.S. proposal states that its tribunal for Darfur could “begin operations without delay” because it would share physical infrastructure with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). However, setting up the tribunal would likely take a long time and create unnecessary delay. This would undermine the deterrent effect of prosecutions and likely lead to more lives being lost.

1. Setting up a new tribunal requires a lot more than physical infrastructure.
• A statute, rules of procedure and evidence, and regulations need to be negotiated, staff would need to be recruited, and qualified judges and a prosecutor would need to be appointed. These are extremely time-consuming tasks.
• The proposed staff appointment process – coordination between the African Union and the U.N. Secretary-General – can also be expected to be a time intensive bureaucratic process. Appointing judges for the second trial chamber at the Sierra Leone Special Court, which took months and months, gives an indication of how difficult this can be.

2. In reality, the ICTR doesn’t have infrastructure to spare.
• With pressure to complete trials by 2008, the ICTR is operating at full capacity.
• In an address to staff on February 10, the ICTR president stated that increasing courtroom capacity and scheduling new trials while handling the eight trials already in progress is a challenge. An additional courtroom is currently being constructed to ensure more steady progress to complete trials.
• The ICTR is also considering sending some of its cases to national courts so that it can complete functioning on schedule.
• This is not a situation where there is spare infrastructure. The basis for the U.S. proposal seems to be lacking.

3. By contrast, the ICC could open investigations relatively quickly and efficiently.
• The ICC is a fully functioning institution. Although it would need to hire several investigators, it already has in place a statute, rules of procedure and evidence, staff, judges, and physical infrastructure.
• By beginning investigations quickly, it could maximize the deterrent effect of prosecutions to stop the violence against civilians in Darfur.

The U.S. Proposal Would Lack the Necessary Permanence to Outlast Obstruction
The U.S. proposal for a new tribunal for Darfur would lack the staying power to withstand predictable non-cooperation by the Sudanese government in the hopes of running out the tribunal’s clock.

1. Ad hoc tribunals are, by their nature, temporary.
• The U.S. proposal states that its tribunal would “operate for 3-5 years, renewable annually as needed.”
• Because no one wants to support a single-issue court forever as they are expensive, the new tribunal for Darfur would in practice be time-limited like the existing ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.

2. Their time-limited nature creates an incentive for non-cooperation.
• Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic are still at liberty some nine years after indictment by the Yugoslav tribunal. In the face of criticisms over expense and delay, this tribunal is under international pressure to wrap up operations by 2010.
• Charles Taylor continues to evade prosecution before the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Due to financial considerations, the court is expected to operate for less time than other ad hoc tribunals, maybe as little as four years.
• Time-limited courts encourage trying to run out the clock as a way to evade justice.

3. Demonstrated staying power is essential for maximizing the deterrent effect of any justice institution assigned responsibility for Darfur.
• The government in Khartoum is likely to remain in power for several years.
• Because those who might be investigated and tried for crimes include persons in or close to the Sudanese government, non-cooperation is predictable.

4. The ICC is here to stay.
• As a permanent international court, the ICC does not face pressure to complete operations before international support wanes.
• It can outlast non-cooperation – precisely the signal that needs to be sent to those most responsible for committing serious crimes in Darfur.

The U.S. Proposal Would Mean Needless Expense for a Weaker Result
The U.S. proposal argues that it does not see a significant difference in cost between its proposal and referral, and that the proposed court may even be less costly. However, ICC prosecutions are unlikely to come anywhere near the estimated cost of the U.S. proposal.

1. The U.S. proposal for a new tribunal for Darfur is likely to cost far more than the ICC.
• According to the U.S. proposal, its tribunal is expected to cost $30 million for the first 6-8 months and then up to $100 million annually.
• The entire budget for the ICC for 2005 is approximately $88 million. This includes investigations into three different situations and payment for general staff and judges.
• While the ICC would have to hire additional investigators, this expense cannot compare with the estimate for the new tribunal for Darfur.

2. The U.S. wants countries that already pay for the ICC – a capable and far preferable option – to share the cost for the U.S. proposed tribunal.
• The U.S. proposal says that the “preferred funding option” is U.N. assessed contributions. This would mean that countries that pay for the ICC, the preferable option, would pay for this new tribunal.

The U.S. Proposal is a Far Cry from being the “African Alternative”
The U.S. proposal says that its tribunal would be “more appropriate” than referral to the ICC as it “takes full account of and reinforces” the African Union (AU) role in addressing the Darfur conflict. This is misleading and inaccurate.

1. The ICC has widespread support in Africa.
• The African Union has many member states that are strong supporters of the ICC and that were heavily involved in the establishment of the court.
• Four AU countries have further demonstrated their support for the ICC by asking the court to investigate crimes committed in their countries.
• Additionally, the ICC can, by statute, sit in Africa.

2. The AU is unlikely to support the U.S. proposal.
• The diverse membership of the AU is unlikely to come to consensus about this court. What the United States is probably trying to do is attract the support of a few African countries to give it the imprimatur of African legitimacy.

3. There are real questions about the legitimacy of the U.S. proposed new tribunal for Darfur.
• It is quite likely that the United States would end up shouldering much of the cost of its tribunal, particularly since there is strong opposition on the Security Council to paying for a new ad hoc tribunal.
• This would certainly cast doubt on the tribunal’s legitimacy and make the court highly dependent on the goodwill of the United States to keep it running. The United States could kill the court at any time.

The Proposed Temporal Jurisdiction for the U.S. Tribunal Offers No Significant Advantage
The United States argues that its tribunal would be preferable because serious crimes were committed in Darfur prior to July 1, 2002 – when the ICC’s jurisdiction begins.

1. However, the overwhelming majority of serious crimes committed in relation to the conflict were committed after July 1, 2002.
2. The advantages of speed and staying power of the ICC outweigh any benefit of being able to potentially prosecute a small number of additional crimes.

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report of the international commission of inquiry

acoustichrmny — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 06:59:10 GMT

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/02/15/sudan10178_txt.htm
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U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Why Alternatives to the ICC Are Inadvisable for Darfur

This excerpt is taken from Section IV of the Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General, dated January 25, 2005. The following paragraphs (573-582) discuss the commission’s findings with regard to the inadvisability of mechanisms other than the International Criminal Court (ICC) to bring justice for crimes in Darfur.

* * *
573. The Commission considers that the ICC is the only credible way of bringing alleged perpetrators to justice. It strongly advises against other measures.

(a.) The inadvisability of setting up an ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal
574. Given that international action is urgently needed, one might consider opportune to establish an ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal, as was the case for previous armed conflicts such as those in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, when the ICC did not exist yet. However, at least two considerations militate against such a solution. First, these Tribunals, however meritorious, are very expensive. Secondly, at least so far, on a number of grounds they have been rather slow in the prosecution and punishment of the indicted persons. It would seem that it is primarily for these reasons that at present no political will appears to exist in the international community to set up yet another ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal (another major reason being that now a permanent and fully-fledged international criminal institution is available).

(b.) The inadvisability to expand to mandate of one of the existing Ad Hoc Criminal Criminal Tribunals

575. The same reasons hold true against the possible expansion, by the Security Council, of the mandate of the ICTY or the ICTR, so as to also include jurisdiction over crimes committed in Darfur. First, this expansion would be time-consuming. It would require, after a decision of the Security Council, the election of new judges and new prosecutors as well as the appointment of Registry staff. Indeed, at present the Tribunals are overstretched, for they are working very hard to implement to “completion strategy” elaborated and approved by the Security Council. Consequently, any new task for either Ad Hoc Criminal Tribunal would require new personnel, at all levels. In addition, the allocation of new tasks and the election or appointment of new staff would obviously require new financing. Thus, the second disadvantage of this option is that it would be very expensive. It should be added the conferment of a new mandate on one of the existing Tribunals would exhibit a third drawback: such expansion could end up creating great confusion in the Tribunal, which all of sudden would have to redesign its priorities and reconvert its tasks so as to accommodate the new functions.

(c.) The inadvisability of establishing mixed courts

576. Where, as in Sudan, States are faced with emergency situations involving the commission of large-scale atrocities, an option may be not to resort to national or international criminal courts, but rather to establish courts that are mixed in their composition, that is consisting of both international judges and prosecutors and of judges and prosecutors having the nationality of the State where the trials are held.

577. The mixed courts established in other conflicts have followed two similar but distinct models. First, the mixed courts can be organs of the relevant State, being part of its judiciary, as in Kosovo, East Timor, Bosnia and Cambodia. Alternatively, the courts may be international in nature, that is, freestanding tribunals not part of the national judiciary, as in Sierra Leone. The latter, for instance, is an international criminal court, but some of its judges and other officials are nationals of Sierra Leone, giving it a hybrid character which makes it different from other international criminal courts, such as the ICC, the ICTY and the ICTR. It also differs from these international criminal courts in that it is located in the country where the crimes occurred and it is funded by voluntary contributions (not assessed contributions from the United Nations budget or, as is the case for the ICC, by the States parties).

578. One obvious drawback for the creation of a special court for the crimes committed in Darfur is its financial implications. The special court for Sierra Leone, with its voluntary contributions, is hardly coping with the demands of justice there. Another major drawback can be seen in the time-consuming process for establishing these courts by means of an agreement with the United Nations. The ICC offers the net advantage, as noted above, to impose no significant financial burden on the international community and to be immediately available.

579. Thirdly, the investigation and prosecution would relate to persons enjoying authority and prestige in the country and wielding control over the State apparatus. The establishment of a special court by agreement between the actual Government and the United Nations for the investigation and prosecution of members of that very Government seems unlikely. Moreover, the situation of the national judges who would sit on courts dealing with crimes which may have been committed by leaders would not only be uncomfortable, but unbearable and dangerous.

580. Fourthly, many of the Sudanese laws are grossly incompatible with international norms. To establish mixed courts with the possibility for them of relying upon the national legal system would give rise to serious problems, particularly with regard to the 1991 Sudanese criminal procedural law. In contrast, the ICC constitutes a self-contained regime, with a set of detailed rules on both substantive and procedural law that are fully attuned to respect for the fundamental human rights all those involved in criminal proceedings before the Court.

581. Furthermore, and importantly, the situation of Sudan is distinguishable in at least one respect from most situations where a special court has been created in the past. The impugned crimes are within the jurisdiction rationae temporis of the ICC, i.e. the crimes discussed in this Report were committed after 1 July 2002 [See ICC Statute, article 11].

582. Based on all of the above, the Commission strongly holds the view that resort to the ICC, the only truly international criminal institution, is the single best mechanism to allow justice to be made for the crimes committed in Darfur.

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take action

acoustichrmny — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 01:10:09 GMT

http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/action/index.asp

or

http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=11501

posted in Sudan - 1 reply

clear the cloud of confusion

acoustichrmny — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:46:55 GMT

Perspectives
FCN Editorial - Clear the cloud of confusion over Sudanese conflict
By FinalCall.com News
Updated Feb 10, 2005, 06:33 pm
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http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/printer_1802.shtml
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There is a cruel irony in recent headlines concerning the Sudan.

Even as a five-member independent commission appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan reports that there is no “genocide” taking place in the country’s western region of Darfur, and before the ink could even dry on the peace treaty ending that country’s 21-year-long civil war, this country’s Cassandras of dissent, disinvestment and protest marches continue to bray at the moon of progress, advancing instead their official campaigns here for regime change there.

"As mightily as some activists here have tried to equate Sudan with apartheid South Africa, the two are not synonymous. Nor is the grave crisis in Darfur synonymous with what happened in the killing fields of Cambodia; nor with Rwanda, when the world looked the other way; nor with what happened in Bosnia, right in the world’s spotlight."

“I am convinced that we must go beyond diplomacy,” argues Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) in a Los Angeles Times editorial Jan. 30. Rep. Lee is trying to convince the California Public Employees Retirement System to divest its investment portfolio of $7.5 billion in holdings in 44 companies whose business is tied in some way to Khartoum.

Recently, the New Jersey Assembly approved legislation to divest its state pension fund from such companies, and Rep. Lee reports that similar efforts in Massachusetts are gaining momentum.

The UN commission on Sudan concluded in its report on Jan. 27, however, that systematic, government-backed violence in the western region of Darfur was not genocide. A recent delegation of Black journalists, human rights activists and community leaders who visited the country for 10 days in mid-January (at the same time the UN Commission was in the country) reached the same irrefutable conclusion.

The UN report, the Give Peace A Chance Coalition (GPAC) delegation which traveled at government expense, as well as a report by the Sudanese government itself all conclude that there is evidence of atrocities committed by forces supported by the Khartoum government, as well as by Darfurian rebels—acts that may rise to the level of “crimes against humanity with an ethnic dimension”—but there is absolutely no evidence that the Sudanese government has ever engaged in a state policy with the goal of eradicating a particular racial or ethnic group. That policy would constitute genocide.

The UN report documents violations of international human rights law, incidents of war crimes by militia and the rebels fighting them, and even names individuals who may have acted with a “genocidal intention.” But there was not sufficient evidence to indicate that the government in Khartoum had a state policy that could be fairly labeled “genocide.”

“From my own eyes, I think that while something is going on there, and there is certainly a loss of life which is regrettable to all of us, I don’t know that it reaches the level of what is commonly called genocide,” said GPAC delegation member Michael Davis, himself a former U.S. delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission. Mr. Davis is also the former western regional director of Amnesty International USA, and is now executive director of the Universal Human Rights Network.

What Mr. Davis saw with his own eyes after visiting Darfur itself—not the rebel refugee camps in neighboring Chad—is illustrative of a big problem in the U.S. political arena: misinformation that seems to be intended to simply slander the Islamic, National Congress government, rather than provide relief to those who are in need and are suffering.

“I tried my best in terms of this genocide—or this alleged genocide—to ask where might I find mass graves? Where might I find huge skeletal remains, as we saw in Rwanda, where more than a million people were killed in virtually hand-to-hand combat?” Mr. Davis asked rhetorically. “I have to say, and that’s not to say they don’t exist, but in my trip to the Sudan and down in Darfur, I did not hear of those kinds of instances. And that is not to reduce the tragedy of what has gone on in Sudan. There is an enormous humanitarian crisis in Darfur, and I believe that as Americans, and particularly as African Americans, we need to reach and we need to work with the government who is now showing signs that their attention is on Darfur, and encourage that they resolve that problem” Mr. Davis said.

Work “with the government,” not, in Rep. Lee’s words, work to “cut off Khartoum’s impunity by divesting from those companies that do business in Sudan.”

The current situation in Sudan is a grave humanitarian crisis that deserves the attention of the Black leadership in this country, including members of Congress, such as Reps. Lee and Donald Payne (D-N.J.).

As mightily as some activists here have tried to equate Sudan with apartheid South Africa, and Africa in 2005 with the apartheid days of 1986, the two are not synonymous. Nor is the grave crisis in Darfur synonymous with what happened in the killing fields of Cambodia. Nor is it synonymous with Rwanda, when the world looked the other way. Nor is it synonymous with what happened in Bosnia, right in the world’s spotlight.

If Blacks in this country and their leadership took “pro-Africa” rather than “no-to-Africa” positions, our Black communities could provide guidance toward solving the Continent’s problems, rather than clouding and confusing the picture concerning the Sudan.

© Copyright 2005 FCN Publishing, FinalCall.com

posted in Sudan - 3 replies

photos

acoustichrmny — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 22:52:28 GMT

i also added these to the gallery
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http://hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/02/index.htm
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Since early 2003, the people of Sudan's western Darfur region have experienced a brutal government-coordinated scorched earth campaign against civilians belonging to the same ethnicity as members of two rebel movements, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). The government's campaign has combined two key elements with devastating consequences for civilians. One is the systematic use of indiscriminate aerial bombardment in North Darfur and to a lesser extent in West and South Darfur. The second is the deployment and coordination of ethnic proxy forces known as "Janjaweed" militias who have been recruited from landless Arab nomadic tribes, some of whom have been involved in past clashes with the farming communities branded as supportive of the rebels.

Almost all of Darfur's population has been affected by the conflict, either directly through attacks on villages, killings, rape, looting and destruction of property and forced displacement, or indirectly through the near total collapse of the region's economy. An estimated two million people have been displaced in less than two years of conflict. An accurate estimate of the total number of conflict-related civilian deaths-including mortality from violence as well as from disease and malnutrition related to displacement-is unavailable, but is likely to surpass 100,000.

To date, the Sudanese government has neither improved security for civilians nor ended the impunity enjoyed by its own officials and allied militia leaders. Immediate action including an increased international presence in rural areas of Darfur is needed to improve protection of civilians and reverse ethnic cleansing. International prosecutions are also essential to provide accountability for crimes against humanity and ensure justice for the victims in Darfur. The Sudanese government is clearly unwilling and unable to hold perpetrators of atrocities to account: a presidential inquiry into abuses recently disputed evidence of widespread and systematic abuses and instead of prosecutions, recommended the formation of a committee. The United Nations Security Council, following receipt of the January 25th report of the international commission of inquiry's investigation into violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law and allegations of genocide in Darfur, should promptly refer the situation of Darfur to the International Criminal Court for prosecution.

posted in Sudan - 4 replies

curiel:why un won't call it genocide

acoustichrmny — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 10:36:11 GMT

Why U.N. Won't Call It Genocide
By Jonathan Curiel
The San Francisco Chronicle
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/020605A.shtml
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/06/INGN6B5HCI1.DTL
--
Sunday 06 February 2005

A man's eyeballs are gouged out. A classroom of school girls is violated in public. Babies are tossed into fires as their mothers watch. Other victims are crucified, dragged on the ground by horses and shot in the head. The United Nations' report -- 176 pages in all -- is filled with many more such horrible details of rapes, killings, assaults and plundering. All of these are crimes -- but do they constitute "genocide"?

No, according to the U.N. report, which examined the extent of atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan, where government-backed militia called the Janjaweed ("devils on horseback") and government soldiers have terrorized civilians for more than a year. Released last week, the finding became an immediate point of contention for those who want the United Nations to do more to halt atrocities in Darfur. Avoiding the g-word is significant because if the United Nations officially labels the Darfur violence "genocide," it's required by its own charter to intervene more forcefully. Critics lashed out at the U.N. commission for soft-pedaling the suffering in Darfur.

"We stand by the conclusion that genocide had been occurring in Darfur," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, "and we think that the continued accumulation of facts on the ground, the facts that are reported in the commission's report, supports that conclusion that we've reached."

It's easy to stay mired in this rhetorical standoff -- to quickly take sides in the question of what constitutes genocide -- but to do so would ignore what may be the most important element of the U.N. commission's report: Its gripping narrative of the Darfur violence. Here is a study that explains all the complexities and contradictions of the ongoing abuses.

Media reports from Darfur make it seem that the conflict is strictly a battle between Khartoum's Arab military and militia and the Sudanese blacks who are the subject of atrocities -- that this racial and ethnic divide is the sole factor in Darfur's mayhem -- but the U.N. study relays these important facts:

-- Many Sudanese Arabs oppose the Janjaweed, and some of these opposition Arabs are fighting alongside rebel groups to defend the black Sudanese who've lived for generations in Darfur's western provinces.

-- Many non-Arabs, including black Sudanese, support the government in Khartoum, and some of these black Sudanese are serving in Khartoum's army.

-- War crimes have been carried out by government and government-backed militia and by the rebel groups operating in Darfur (though the rebels' acts pale in comparison).

-- The Darfur conflict is tied to Khartoum's long-standing conflict in southern Sudan. This North-South war, which started in 1983, created a vacuum of soldiers that -- at least in Darfur -- was filled by the Janjaweed and even volunteer militants from neighboring countries. The North-South war was rooted in disputes over religion (the north is more Islamic than the Christian and animist south), oil (Khartoum claimed areas of southern Sudan that had large petrol deposits) and other issues.

-- Drought and limited economic opportunities have fueled the Darfur violence. Most of the people of Darfur live in small villages and hamlets, and make their living from farming and cattle herding. The land is arid. Combined with drought, the desertification of the region has led to increased skirmishes among tribes and foreign herders looking for pasture and water -- skirmishes that Khartoum settled on its own legal terms, ignoring traditional tribal laws. This helped create a climate of animosity that prompted Darfur's rebel groups to fight Khartoum.

Adotei Akwei, the Africa Advocacy Director for Amnesty International's United States office, said in a phone interview, "Our organization has not termed (the Darfur violence) genocide. Others disagree with us (but) we don't have time to debate (whether genocide is technically taking place in Darfur). We need to protect people. It's important to debate what the nature of the violations is, but it's not going to save lives ultimately whether this is called genocide or not.

"What's going to save lives is the actual changing of behavior on the ground in Darfur. The nature of the crimes in Darfur are all serious enough to merit a more robust response from the international community and by the United Nations."

The U.N. report is online at www.un.org/news/dh/sudan/com_inq_darfur.pdf. For those who want to focus on the question of genocide, pages 124-132 are crucial.

There, the U.N. commission explains why it believes the word "genocide" cannot be applied to Darfur. The commission says that the Janjaweed and Khartoum's forces have not killed or harmed every civilian they've encountered in Darfur -- that their actions (however gruesome) have not resulted in an intentional annihilation of an entire people. In other words, Darfur is different from Nazi Germany, where whole categories of people (Jews, Gypsies, etc.) were deliberately targeted because of their religion, race, ethnicity or nationality, and Darfur is different from Bosnia-Herzegovia, where Muslims were targeted in masse.

The U.N. commission wasn't trying to absolve the atrocities committed by both sides in Darfur. In fact, the report states unequivocally that the perpetrators of violence in Darfur should be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible. On this point, there is no debate at all.

posted in Sudan - 3 replies

genocidal intent

acoustichrmny — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 23:08:23 GMT

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=311966#1
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SUDAN
Genocidal Intent

A United Nations panel created last fall to investigate the crisis in Sudan has found the government is responsible for "widespread and systematic" abuses against human rights. The five-member commission found the Sudanese government and its militia – the Janjaweed – has systematically engaged in violence including "murder, torture, kidnapping, rape, forced displacement and the destruction of villages."

THE SITUATION SO FAR: Since February 2003, "more than 70,000 people have died from violence and resulting disease, and more than 1.8 million have been driven from their homes." (To put this in perspective, the World Health Organization estimates that 10,000 people die each month in Darfur. At a rate of 14 deaths per hour, the number of lives lost each week is equivalent to the total lost in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.) The commission found the carnage does not fall under the technical definition of "genocide." It did, however, find that government officials and militia leaders have committed acts with "genocidal intent." Also, the panel determined that the "gravity of the crimes perpetrated" in Darfur may be "no less serious and heinous than genocide." With the casualty count rising with each passing day, it is imperative for President Bush to take action. (For more on Sudan by the numbers, check out this fact sheet from the Center for American Progress.)

WORKING WITH THE ICC: Instead of leading the international community to swiftly do the right thing and act on the panel's recommendations, the United States is stirring up a political battle. The U.N. report "strongly recommends" that the International Criminal Court should investigate the human rights abuses in Sudan; since Sudan is not a signatory to the ICC treaty, the U.N. Security Council would have to vote to refer the investigation to the court. Emyr Jones Parry, Britain's U.N. ambassador, agrees: "This is a case which is tailor-made for the ICC." The Bush administration, however, opposes the existence of the ICC; the White House says it fears that allowing the ICC to investigate in Sudan – thus legitimizing it – would put U.S. citizens at risk of politically motivated trials in the future. Former Bush administration official Jack Goldsmith strongly disagrees. "In fact," he writes, "such a referral would be consistent with U.S. policy on the ICC." The United States has always said ICC prosecutions of non-treaty parties (like the U.S.) would be legitimate "if they received the imprimatur of the Security Council." Thus, allowing the U.N Security Council to refer the case to the ICC gives the United States room to argue "that Security Council referrals are the only valid route to ICC prosecutions and that countries that are not parties to the ICC…remain immune from ICC control in the absence of such a referral."

STEPPING UP PRESSURE: Little is being done to pressure the Sudanese government to stop the violence. As the Washington Post writes, "The United States and its allies have sounded gruff and impatient about Darfur for months, and they have provided generous relief supplies. But they haven't done what's needed to alter the basic calculation of Sudan's regime: that it can get away with genocide." Just this past month, new attacks killed more than 200 civilians, many of whom were women and children. Most observers believe that a referral to the ICC would get Khartoum's attention, and might constitute the kind of pressure that would cause the Sudanese government to rethink its actions.

MARATHON RUN AROUND SANCTIONS: Sudan is on the official State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism, and the U.S. has imposed unilateral sanctions. As a result, "financial dealings with Sudan are prohibited." Financial sanctions are an important tool in the arsenal to force the Sudanese government to end its human rights abuses. One powerful oil company may have maneuvered around the restrictions. In December, after five months of negotiations, the Texas-based Marathon Oil Corp. renewed a contract with the government of Sudan. The U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control gave the thumbs up, and Marathon "recently resumed payments" to the Sudanese government. (Previous payments were suspended in 1985 due to the civil war.)

THE SOUNDS OF WHITE HOUSE SILENCE: The White House has been passive about fighting the atrocities which are still being committed in Sudan. During her nomination hearings, for example, new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice left Sudan off of her list of places needing the U.S. to look out for oppressed people, although she did mention "Cuba and Burma, and North Korea and Iran and Belarus and Zimbabwe." And although President Bush peppered his recent inaugural address with vague words about freedom and liberty, he didn't mention the very concrete problems in Sudan.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

sudan not genocide

acoustichrmny — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 19:53:03 GMT

Darfur killings not genocide, says UN group
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
31 January 2005
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=606212
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A special United Nations commission has decided that two years of violence in the western Sudan region of Darfur was not genocide but "crimes against humanity with ethnic dimensions", according to leaks of the report in the US.

The commission, led by the Italian judge Antonio Cassese, documents breaches of international human rights law and other war crimes, and names individuals who may have acted with "genocidal intent". But it failed to find evidence that the government in Khartoum, widely accused of backing the militias, had a specific policy of exterminating a particular ethnic group, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The report is to be made public this week, after it goes to the Security Council. But it could set off a new dispute between the US and its key allies. In September, the State Department said the murder of tens of thousands of people in Darfur, and the forced uprooting of 1.8 million more, did constitute genocide. It spoke of a pattern of targeted violence, co-ordinated by the government and committed by state-backed militias.

Even more problematic however than semantics could be the report's leaked recommendation that war crimes and human rights violations should be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC), an institution backed by Europe and most African countries, but strenuously opposed by the US.

As a result, the Bush administration is caught in a tug-of-war, between its desire to punish those responsible for what it has declared a genocide, and its dislike of the ICC, which it believes will turn into a vehicle for anti-Americanism, and politically motivated prosecutions of US troops and officials.

Instead, Washington has proposed a special court, akin to the war crimes tribunal that prosecuted the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. But Europe, Africa and Russia and China, which opposed sanctions on the Sudanese government, have indicated they favour the ICC.

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said Darfur represented a "watershed moment" for the new international court. But there are concerns about whether Britain will temper its support for the ICC.

Yesterday Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, insisted that despite the reluctance of Russia and China, the Security Council should still consider sanctions against Sudan. "Serious violations of international humanitarian law, and gross violations of human rights have taken place," Mr Annan told reporters during an African Union summit in Nigeria. "Action will have to be taken. The council had considered sanctions and had not been able to move forward because of some divisions, but I believe sanctions should still be on the table."

This month, a peace agreement was signed in the 21- year-old civil war between north and south in Sudan but African Union ceasefire monitors said 100 people were killed by bombs dropped by Sudanese government aircraft in southern Darfur only last Wednesday.

Lord Alton of Liverpool, who visited Darfur last October, said: "The long-awaited UN commission on events in Darfur has, in effect, given the government of Sudan permission to continue killing its black African population with impunity."

posted in Sudan - 3 replies

targeting the fur:mass murder in darfur

acoustichrmny — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 23:36:32 GMT

http://hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/darfur0105/
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summary
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Since February 2003, Darfur has been the scene of massive crimes against civilians of particular ethnicities in the context of an internal conflict between the Sudanese government and a rebel insurgency. Almost two million people have been forcibly displaced and stripped of all their property and tens of thousands of people have been killed, raped or assaulted.1 Even against this backdrop of extreme violence against civilians, several incidents in March 2004 stand out for the extraordinary level of brutality demonstrated by the perpetrators. In one incident, Sudanese government and “Janjaweed”2 militia forces detained and then conducted mass executions of more than 200 farmers and community leaders of Fur ethnicity in the Wadi Saleh area of West Darfur. In a second incident in neighboring Shattaya locality, government and militia forces attacked Fur civilians, detained them in appalling conditions for weeks, and subjected many to torture.

To date, the Sudanese government has neither improved security for civilians nor ended the impunity enjoyed by its own officials and allied militia leaders. Immediate action including an increased international presence in rural areas of Darfur is needed to improve protection of civilians and reverse ethnic cleansing. International prosecutions are also essential to provide accountability for crimes against humanity and ensure justice for the victims in Darfur. The Sudanese government is clearly unwilling and unable to hold perpetrators of atrocities to account: a presidential inquiry into abuses recently disputed evidence of widespread and systematic abuses and instead of prosecutions, recommended the formation of a committee.3 The United Nations Security Council, following receipt of the January 25th report of the international commission of inquiry’s investigation into violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law and allegations of genocide in Darfur, should promptly refer the situation of Darfur to the International Criminal Court for prosecution.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] See Human Rights Watch reports: Darfur in Flames: Atrocities in Western Sudan, Vol.16, No.5 (A), April 2004, Darfur Destroyed: Ethnic Cleansing by Government and Militia Forces in Western Sudan, Vol.16, No. 6(A), May 2004, “Darfur Documents Confirm Government Policy of Militia Support,” July 20, 2004, “Empty Promises: Continuing Abuses in Darfur, Sudan,” August 11, 2004, and “If We Return We Will Be Killed,” November 2004.

[2] The term “Janjaweed” has become the source of increasing controversy, with different actors using the term in very different ways. The term historically referred to criminals, bandits or outlaws. In the wake of the conflict in Darfur, many “African” victims of attacks have used the term to refer to the government-backed militias attacking their villages, many of whom are drawn from nomadic groups of Arab ethnic origin. Victims have also used other terms, such as “fursan” and “peshmarga” to describe these government-backed militias. The Sudanese government and members of the government-backed militias themselves reject the name “Janjaweed”, see “Sudan Arabs Reject Marauding ‘Janjaweed’ Image,” Reuters, July 12, 2004. Other terms used by the Sudanese government include the terms “outlaws” and “Tora Bora,” to refer to the rebels, and the terms “knights,” “mujaheeden” or “horsemen” which appear to refer to members of its own militias. See also “Who are the Janjaweed?” in Human Rights Watch report, Empty Promises: Continuing Abuses in Darfur, Sudan, pp.11-13.

[3] “Sudan inquiry denies Darfur genocide,” Agence France Presse, January 20, 2004, at http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200501/s1285951.htm

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

darfur:never again?

acoustichrmny — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 23:13:19 GMT

Darfur: Never again?
As the world prepares to commemorate Holocaust Day, crimes against humanity are still being committed in Darfur while diplomats bicker
By Anne Penketh
26 January 2005
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=604617
----
The attackers, as they have done so often, rampaged through terrified people, shouting "kill the slaves". They cried: "We have orders to kill all the blacks". Eight more villages in Darfur were torched in a single day by armed men in a concerted operation. No one knows how many were killed, but it is the latest evidence that inaction by the international community has emboldened the Janjaweed Arab militias and their backers in the Islamist government in Khartoum.

As arguments rage over who was to blame for the attacks five days ago, the UN is deciding whether the atrocities of the past two years amount to genocide. Human rights organisations are using the occasion of Holocaust Day tomorrow to call for international war trials to help stop the crimes still being committed against the civilians of Darfur.

Here are the facts. More than 70,000 people have been killed. More than 1.6 million have been forced from their homes in a conflict that has been described as "the world's worst humanitarian crisis". The continuing violence has been so intense that international aid agencies have been forced to suspend their work after coming under attack.

While the diplomats debate how to respond, the survivors of the atrocities are left traumatised, many in refugee camps. More than 60 per cent of refugees from Darfur have witnessed the killing of a family member by the men on horseback. Four out of every five people have witnessed the destruction of their villages. Two-thirds saw government planes laden with bombs target fleeing civilians. One-third heard racial abuse while they and their relatives were being murdered or raped.

After the Rwandan genocide in 1994, just as after the Holocaust when six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis, the world said "never again". Now, there is Darfur.

Efforts to bring Sudan before the International Criminal Court - a move theoretically backed by the UK - have been undermined by the Bush administration's hostility to the court which was specifically set up to judge those suspected of genocide and crimes against humanity.

The United States has, at least, publicly branded these atrocities as genocide. The British Government has refused to do so, preferring to wait for the conclusions of an international commission of inquiry which reported back to the UN secretary general yesterday.

The four-man panel, led by the Italian jurist, Antonio Cassese, was asked to investigate the Darfur killings, determine whether genocide had occurred and to identify perpetrators with a view to holding them accountable. Kofi Annan is expected to submit the report to the UN Security Council next Monday, when debate will be engaged between supporters of the International Criminal Court and its main detractor, the United States, which went so far as to unsign the treaty setting up the tribunal.

The slaughter, ethnic cleansing and burning of villages began two years ago. In July last year the Bush administration called it genocide, a term with legal connotations under the genocide convention which makes it imperative to act.

For the Blair government, a founding member of the International Criminal Court which has nailed its colours to the mast on Africa during its presidency of the G8 leading industrialised countries, it will be a moment to decide whether to stand up to the Bush administration. Not only has Tony Blair famously described Africa as "a scar on the conscience of the world," he has set up an Africa Commission to provide solutions for the continent during the British G8 presidency.

With a general election looming, the Government's reaction to the ruling of the UN commission of inquiry will be an acid test of its independence from the right-wing agenda of the Bush administration.

According to the head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, if Britain looks for a compromise with Washington, it risks killing the court.

The report now on Mr Annan's desk may fudge the issue of genocide, which according to the textbooks is "the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such". But human rights advocates maintain that genocide or not, the Security Council must rule that crimes against humanity were, and are, being committed and must be referred to the international court for prosecution.

Privately, British diplomats welcome intervention by the international court. But the test for Britain will be on whether it caves in to US pressure for a ill-defined "ad hoc" tribunal for Sudan.

Such proposals are opposed by human rights organisations who say the International Criminal Court is the only place for the Sudanese suspects to be tried. Even the outgoing US ambassador to the United Nations, John Danforth, who was instrumental in pressing for UN sanctions against Khartoum, had pressed for a referral to the International Criminal Court before being overruled by the hawks in Washington.

"I do not know whether the international commission will determine there was genocide, which requires the evidence to be weighed very carefully," said Juan Mendez, the special adviser to the UN secretary general on the prevention of genocide.

"But I am persuaded there were war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur, with a clear ethnic dimension. I will respect the view of the commission, but in my view these crimes merit international punishment, and the best scenario for that is the International Criminal Court."

For the British genocide-prevention group, Aegis Trust, there is no argument. "Was the killing intentional? Yes," it said in a report issued less than two months ago. "Was it systematically organised by the al-Bashir regime using govern- ment-armed Janjaweed militias, bombers and helicopter gunships? Yes. Were the victims chosen because of their ethnic and racial identity? Yes.

"This, in short, is genocide. The genocide continues."

At present, in Darfur, 790 African Union soldiers are ensuring the protection of "ceasefire monitors" in an area the size of France, where they have no mandate to protect civilians as the war goes on.

The Security Council, despite threatening sanctions four months ago against the Sudanese government, has done nothing, preferring to allow the African Union to take the lead in a hopelessly under-equipped mission. The council is bitterly divided, with the veto-wielding powers Russia and China opposed to punitive action.

The Sudanese government may be hoping the world is preoccupied with the next humanitarian disaster: the victims of the Boxing Day tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people across south Asia.

But for Britain, as a powerful member of the UN Security Council, the moment of truth is now at hand.

DARFUR TWO YEARS OF CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

March 2003 Fighting breaks out in Darfur between government forces and rebels. Refugees start fleeing into Chad

January 2004 Aid agencies' response begins in earnest to help thousands of displaced

2 April UN says "scorched-earth" campaign of ethnic cleansing by Janjaweed militias against Darfur's black African population is taking place

4 May UN officials describe Darfur as one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world

7 May Two human rights reports find Sudanese government and Arab militias carrying out massive human rights violations which "may constitute war crimes and/or crimes against humanity"

5 August UN signs agreement with Sudanese government committing Khartoum to take detailed steps in next 30 days to disarm Janjaweed

September UN announces Khartoum has not disarmed the Janjaweed or stopped attacking civilians. US Secretary of State Colin Powell describes Darfur killings as "genocide"

18 September Security Council threatens sanctions against Khartoum and requests UN set up genocide inquiry

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Article

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 22:03:37 GMT

Just poseted a great article from Time on this. It's from October of '04, but still very good to read. It's in the tribe album.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Sudan pledges to halt darfur operations.

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 01:00:18 GMT

Sudan Pledges to Halt Darfur Operations

Published: 12/19/04

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) - Sudan has pledged to halt military operations in Darfur, a United Nations spokeswoman said Sunday, but African Union officials said the government had kept up attacks on rebels in the region.

Union officials, in charge of monitoring a truce, said Khartoum had defied a Saturday ultimatum set by Union mediators, who had threatened to refer Sudan and the rebels to the U.N. Security Council if the two sides failed to meet the deadline.

Two Darfur rebel movements in Abuja on Sunday also accused the Sudanese government and the pro-government Janjaweed militia of continued attacks on villages.

Charges and countercharges are common in the war in Darfur, a conflict that has defeated three rounds of peace talks and displaced nearly 2 million people since it began in February 2003.

"The government has pledged to halt all (current) military hostilities in Darfur and asked that the rebels do the same," said Radhia Achouri, a U.N. spokeswoman, after a security meeting Sunday between Sudanese government representatives, the United Nations and Western diplomats.

Achouri said the Sudanese government had also agreed to withdraw its troops from some areas in Darfur after it consults with the African Union on exact locations.

A spokesman for the rebel groups said the government and Janjaweed were trying to scuttle the peace talks by launching attacks around the villages of Mala and Arla as late as Sunday morning.

"We're asking the AU and the international community to put more pressure on the (Sudanese) government to stop these barbaric attacks on civilians," said Ahmed Tugod Lissan, a spokesman for two rebel groups.

The Sudanese government requested that the United Nations convey a request for cessation of attacks to the rebels, said Achouri, "So now we are going to relay this to the other party."

The rebels did not issue an immediate response.

Achouri said the United Nations expressed its "concern and that of the international community" over the recent government military operation, code-named "road clearance," in the meeting with Sudan.

The war was sparked in February 2003 when two non-Arab African rebel groups took up arms to fight for more power and resources from the Arab-dominated Khartoum government.

The government allegedly responded by backing the Janjaweed, an Arab militia, which is accused of targeting civilians in a campaign of murder, rape and arson. The United States accuses the Janjaweed of committing genocide.

Disease and hunger have killed 70,000 in Darfur since March, the World Health Organization says.

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

So....now what?

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 04:40:45 GMT

Obviously all of us here are interested in what is happening in Sudan.

What should be done? Surely something.

Personally, I think we should send in the Marines. I doubt anything short of a full on intervention could assist these poor people. I do not mean we invade to conquer, but to give aid and stop the killing.

posted in Sudan - 7 replies

Sudan links

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 13:55:24 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/africa/2004/sudan/default.stm

http://hrw.org/doc?t=africa&c=sudan

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/action/sudan

http://news.amnesty.org/index/ENGAFR5420320044

http://www.insightnewstv.com/refugees

posted in Sudan - 0 replies

Living with Refugees

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 14:12:50 GMT

Documentary about the refugee crisis in Darfur, Sudan:

http://www.insightnewstv.com/refugees

posted in Sudan - 0 replies