UN Gravely concerned by reports of Ethnic Cleansing in Sudan by Secretary-General Kofi Annan 2:40pm 1st Apr, 2004   Sudan: Annan warns of 'devastating impact' of fighting in Darfur region.(UN News)    31 March 2004 – Calling civilian casualties and human rights violations unacceptable, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today he was "very disturbed" by the continuing conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan.    In a statement issued by his spokesperson in New York, and distributed to the Darfur ceasefire talks being held in Chad, Mr. Annan said the fighting in Darfur "is having a devastating impact on the lives and well being of the people."    UN officials and agencies have warned over recent weeks that a dire humanitarian crisis is taking place in Darfur, with more than 750,000 Sudanese internally displaced and another 110,000 people fleeing across the border to neighbouring Chad.    Fighting has raged for more than a year between the Sudanese Government, allied militias and rebel groups. Earlier this week, a group of eight UN experts, mostly rapporteurs, said they were concerned by reports that militias, encouraged by the Sudanese Government, were conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign against the local non-Arab population.    In his statement today, Mr. Annan said he welcomed the efforts of Chad's President Idriss Deby, the Sudanese Government, parties to the conflict and the international community to end the hostilities and draw up a long-term solution. He said the UN stands ready to help in any way in the search for solutions    Calling for the fighting to stop first, the Secretary-General also said humanitarian organizations must be allowed safe and unimpeded access to Darfur to help needy civilians.    29 March 2004    Eight United Nations human rights fact-finding experts have issued a statement saying they are “gravely concerned” by the reports of ethnic cleansing and widespread human rights abuses occurring in the Darfur region of western Sudan.    The experts, mostly rapporteurs who have been charged by the UN with monitoring issues such as torture, extrajudicial executions and the right to food, said in a statement released Friday that they have informed the Sudanese Government about their concerns.    In just over a year, more than 110,000 Sudanese have fled across the border into neighbouring Chad and another 750,000 have become internally displaced within Sudan as a result of conflict in Darfur between the national Government, allied militias and rebel groups.    In their statement, the experts said they were alarmed after the UN coordinator in Sudan, Mukesh Kapila, told the media that an ethnic cleansing campaign was taking place that was comparable in character, if not scale, to the Rwanda genocide of 1994.    The experts pointed to reports that militias such as the Janjaweed, the Muraheleen and the Popular Defence Forces, encouraged by the Sudanese Government, are trying to forcibly remove the non-Arab segment of the local population. These reports say the victims are mainly from the Fur ethnic communities of the Masalit, Dajo, Tunjur, Tama and Zaghawas.    According to recent reports, scores of civilians have been killed, children abducted, women and girls raped, dozens of villages burnt and looted and livestock destroyed by the militias, while fleeing refugees and internally displaced people have been attacked.    The experts called on all parties in the Darfur conflict to treat civilians according to international humanitarian and human rights law, and stressed the importance of identifying the perpetrators of human rights abuses.    April 3, 2004    Genocide is going on right now in Sudan. So what is the West doing about it, asks Nicholas Kristof. (New York Times)    So why is Africa such a mess? To answer that question, let me tell you about a 34-year-old man who limped over to me here at Adre, an oasis in eastern Chad.    "My name is Moussa Tamadji Yodi," he said in elegant French, "and I'm a teacher . . . I just crossed the border yesterday from Sudan. I was beaten up and lost everything."    Yodi, a college graduate, speaks French, Arabic, English and two African languages. During the decades of Chad's civil war, he fled across the border into the Darfur region of Sudan to seek refuge.    Darfur has erupted into its own civil war and genocide. Yodi told how a government-backed Arab militia stopped his truck - the equivalent of a public bus - and forced everyone off. The troops let some people go, robbed and beat others, and shot one young man in the head, probably because he was from the Zaghawa tribe, which the Arab militias are trying to wipe out.    "Nobody reacted," Yodi said. "We were all afraid." So Yodi is a refugee for a second time, fleeing another civil war. And that is a window into Africa's central problem: insecurity.    There is no formula for economic development, but three factors seem crucial: security, market-oriented policies and good governance.    Botswana is the only African country that has enjoyed all three in the past 40 years, and it has been one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. And when these conditions applied, Uganda, Ghana, Mozambique and Rwanda boomed.    But the African leaders who cared the most about their people - leaders such as Julius Nyerere of Tanzania or Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana - tended to adopt quasi-socialist policies that hurt their people. In recent decades, Africans did much better ruled with capitalism than with compassion. These days, African economic policies are more market-oriented, and governance is improving. The big civil wars are winding down. All this leaves me guardedly optimistic.    Yet Africa's biggest problem is still security. The end of the Cold War has seen a surge in civil conflict, partly because great powers no longer stabilise client states. One-fifth of Africans live in nations shaken by recent wars.    My New York Times colleague Howard French forcefully scolds the West in his new book, A Continent for the Taking, for deliberately looking away from eruptions of unspeakable violence.    One lesson of the past dozen years is that instead of being purely reactive, helpfully bulldozing mass graves after massacres, African and Western leaders should try much harder to stop civil wars as they start.    The world is facing a critical test of that principle in the Darfur region of Sudan, where Arab militias are killing and driving out darker-skinned African tribespeople. While the world marks the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and solemnly asserts that this must never happen again, it is happening. Again.    Some 1000 people are dying each week in Sudan, and 110,000 refugees, like Yodi, have poured into Chad. Worse off are the 600,000 refugees within Sudan, who face hunger and disease after being driven from their villages by the Arab militias. "They come with camels, with guns, and they ask for the men," Yodi said. "Then they kill the men and rape the women and steal everything." One of their objectives, he added, "is to wipe out blacks".    This is not a case when we can claim, as the world did after the Armenian, Jewish and Cambodian genocides, that we didn't know how bad it was. Sudan's refugees tell of mass killings and rapes, of women branded, of children killed, of villages burned - yet Sudan's Government just stiffed new peace talks that began on Tuesday night in Chad.    So far the UN Security Council hasn't even got around to discussing the genocide. And while US President George Bush, to his credit, raised the issue privately in a telephone conversation last week with the president of Sudan, he has not said a peep about it publicly.    It's time for Bush and other Western leaders to speak out forcefully against the slaughter.    This is not just a moral test of whether the world will tolerate another genocide. It's also a practical test of the ability of African and Western governments to respond to incipient civil wars while they can still be suppressed. Africa's future depends on the outcome, and for now it's a test we're all failing.    - New York Times
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