Sudan Pledges to Disarm Militias, Protect Camps / Groups demand further action to halt Mass Death by Washington Post / One World 2:00pm 3rd Jul, 2004   July 4, 2004    "Sudan Pledges to Disarm Militias, Protect Camps", by Emily Wax. (Washington Post Foreign Service)    KHARTOUM, Sudan, July 3 -- The government of Sudan announced Saturday that it would send troops to the western region of Darfur and disarm Arab militias known as the Janjaweed to end violence that has displaced more than 1 million African villagers.    In a statement issued jointly with the United Nations, the government said it was committed to start immediately disarming the Arab militias, which are accused of killings, rapes and beatings that have driven the villagers, who view themselves as African, from their homes. Aid groups and witnesses said the government armed the militias and bombed villages, charges officials have denied.    The communique was signed at the airport in Khartoum moments before U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan departed the country after a two-day tour of refugee camps in Darfur and neighboring Chad, where more than 150,000 refugees live in tent cities.    Sudanese officials promised to deploy a "strong, credible" police force to protect the camps and other areas vulnerable to attacks, the communique said. Officials also promised to develop a system that would allow women who have been raped during the crisis to bring charges against alleged assailants. Sexual violence against women in Darfur emerged as a major concern during Annan's visit, his aides said.    On Friday, Annan visited the crowded Iridimi camp in Chad, a maze of stick and straw shelters housing 15,000 Sudanese refugees, 44 miles west of the border with Sudan. Refugees at the sand-blown camp formed a giant circle as they awaited his arrival.    On Friday night, after meeting with Sudan's president, Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir, Annan told reporters: The Janjaweed must be stopped, and a cease-fire must be respected by all," he said.    Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also visited Sudan this week, pressing the government to disarm the Janjaweed. The United States began circulating a U.N. Security Council resolution Wednesday that would impose an arms embargo and travel ban on the militias.    The Darfur conflict began in early 2003, when the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Army, two African rebel groups, attacked military installations, charging that the government had treated Africans unjustly in their struggles with Arab herders over land and resources. In response, the government began arming the militias and bombed African villages, according to human rights groups and U.N. reports. An estimated 30,000 have been killed in the conflict.    Human Rights Watch and aid groups expressed skepticism Saturday about the government's promise to disarm the militias, citing reports that several villages in southern Darfur were bombed on Thursday.    U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland warned that the Janjaweed must not be incorporated into the Sudanese army or used to guard citizens that they had earlier attacked, a development aid workers fear is already happening. Some of the militia fighters were now wearing government uniforms, aid workers said. "You don't want a case where the wolf is guarding the sheep," Egeland said. "We will have to monitor this closely."    © 2004 The Washington Post Compan    July 1, 2004    "Groups Want More Action to Halt Mass Death in Darfur ", by Jim Lobe. (OneWorld.net )    by Jim Lobe    WASHINGTON - In the wake of an unprecedented visit to Khartoum by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, Sudan's foreign minister Wednesday promised that his government will halt raiding by government-backed Arab militias in the country's Darfur region, but independent groups say the international community should not delay any further before taking measures to punish the regime and prepare a military intervention.    "The government has made similar promises so many times before that the world simply can't take it seriously," said Salih Booker, executive director of Africa Action, a Washington-based grassroots group that has collected more than 20,000 signatures on a petition urging Powell, who visited a concentration camp in Darfur Wednesday, to declare the situation "genocide" and push for an immediate U.S.-led intervention.    "The Khartoum government is clearly responsible for the genocide taking place in Darfur, and yet it continues to deny its role and obstruct humanitarian access to the region," said Booker. "Rather than traveling halfway around the world to hold talks with this murderous regime, Powell could achieve much more by simply uttering one word - 'genocide.'"    Powell's visit appeared designed to focus global attention on the situation in Darfur and exert more direct pressure on the National Islamic Front (NIF) government headed by Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir with whom he met briefly Tuesday. It was the highest-level U.S. visit to Khartoum in almost 30 years.    During the meeting, Powell reportedly warned that Washington will not normalize relations with Khartoum until it enters into serious peace talks with rebels in Darfur and fully cooperates with international relief efforts to return about 1.3 million people who since early last year have been forced to flee a scorched-earth campaign carried out by rampaging Arab militias, called the Janjaweed, and government bombing.    As many as 30,000 people reportedly have been killed to date, while an estimated 200,000 fled across the border into Chad. The rest have been displaced within Darfur, as many as 800,000 of them herded into camps where, according to a UN team that visited the region in late April, they are suffering high rates of malnutrition.    Given the restrictions imposed by the government in getting relief supplies to the needy, experts, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), have warned that more than 300,000 people are likely to die by the end of the year even if humanitarian agencies were given unimpeded access immediately. On Friday, the UN's World Food Program (WPF) said at least 300,000 of the displaced go without any food this month because of security conditions.    Powell is also reported to have warned Bashir and other Sudanese officials that the U.S. will impose sanctions against the government if its full cooperation is not forthcoming. While Powell visited Darfur Wednesday, and with Annan expected on Thursday, the U.S. delegation at the UN Security Council circulated a draft resolution calling for the immediate imposition of an arms embargo and travel ban against Janajaweed leaders to be followed 30 days later by similar action against government officials if action is not taken.    Whether Khartoum's leaders, who have insisted for much of the past month that reports by the UN, the media, and relief agencies are exaggerated, will indeed take action, however, remains to be seen.    Meanwhile, however, pressure on the administration to take stronger action is rising back in Washington. In addition to Africa Action's petition, which was endorsed last week by the entire Congressional Black Caucus, the US Committee for Refugees (USCR) has also called on Bush to declare the situation in Darfur "genocide" and "urgently expand our capacity to provide emergency humanitarian assistance to the refugees in Chad and the internally displaced in Darfur."    On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group (ICG) took out a rare ad in the New York Times op-ed page calling on the Security Council not only to apply targeted sanctions against specific individuals but also to "authorize ultimate military intervention" if Khartoum does not stop the Janjaweed, grant full access to humanitarian groups and international monitors throughout the province, and launch good-faith negotiations with rebel groups in the region.    "Anything less," the two groups said, "will run the risk of all of us in the international community - ten years after the Rwandan genocide - having once more hundreds of thousands of deaths on our collective conscience."    Last week, two senior Republican senators, Mike DeWine of Ohio and John McCain of Arizona, also compared the situation to Rwanda, where some 800,000 people were killed in just two months, and called for immediate action, including providing financial and logistical support to countries that are willing to provide peacekeeping forces, as well as urging the Security Council to impose sanctions.    At the same time, Congress agreed to provide US$95 million in emergency funding to help the refugees, although it defeated an amendment by Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden to add an additional $118 million.    The roots of the current conflict lie with competition over land between Arab herders and farmers from three African tribes - the Fur, the Masaalit, and Zaghawa. Early last year, two rebel groups from the African tribes, who, like the Arabs, are Muslim, attacked an army base to protest the government's failure to protect them from Janjaweed raids as well as their marginalization in the region's development. Khartoum responded with a ferocious counter-insurgency campaign that included supplying the Janjaweed with heavier weapons, carrying out joint missions with the militias and bombing African towns and villages.    Just last week, USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios presented Annan and the five permanent members of the Security Council with satellite photographs of nearly 600 villages in the region, 300 of which had "been completely destroyed," and 76 "severely damaged." "The rest are fine, and they are all Arab," he said. "It's clear that ethnic cleansing is going on here."    So far, both Washington and the UN have used "ethnic cleansing" to describe the situation, although U.S. war crimes ambassador Pierre-Richard Prosper last week said there were "indicators of genocide," and Powell himself reported two weeks ago that State Department lawyers were discussing whether "genocide" was an appropriate way to describe what is happening.    The use of the word has decisive consequences, as noted by Africa Action's Booker. All permanent members of the UN Security Council, including the U.S., are parties to the 1948 Convention on Genocide and are thus bound to prevent and punish the crime, unilaterally if necessary. Genocide is defined as the commission of acts with "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."    With 2,000 U.S. troops stationed in nearby Djibouti, according to Booker, the U.S. could play the leading role in spearheading a multinational effort to secure the region and open the way to the kind of massive relief operation that experts increasingly believe is essential to save hundreds of thousands of lives.    © Copyright OneWorld.net    29 June 2004    Sudan: UN human rights expert expects large number of deaths in Darfur (UN News)    The number of black Africans killed by Arab militias in the Darfur region of Sudan is "bound to be staggering," a United Nations human rights expert said today as she called on the Sudanese Government to end the culture of impunity for those committing human rights abuses in the region.    Briefing reporters in New York after completing a 13-day tour of Sudan earlier this month, Asma Jahangir, the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said there was no doubt that Khartoum had sponsored, armed or recruited the so-called Janjaweed Arab militias.    Last month two UN human rights fact-finding reports said the Janjaweed and other militias allied to the Government had committed numerous human rights violations in Darfur, including murders, rapes and the looting and destruction of villages.    Ms. Jahangir said that during her visit, "nearly every third or fourth family" she spoke to in the camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) within Darfur had lost a relative to the militias."It's very hard to say [accurately] how many people have been killed," she said, but interviews with IDPs indicated it would be "quite a large number…They are bound to be staggering."    UN agencies estimate that two million people need food and humanitarian assistance as a result of the conflict. There are more than one million IDPs and at least another 150,000 others have fled to Chad.    Ms. Jahangir said it is vital that the international community begins to catalogue what has happened in Darfur since fighting broke out between the Sudanese Government and two rebel groups early last year. Once it does that, it can decide what steps to take against the planners of the militia campaign.    She said the militias - who, like their targets, are predominantly Muslim - often wear the uniforms of Government soldiers and use Government vehicles. They also often make their raids on villages in concert with attacks by military forces, she said.    Ms. Jahangir stressed she did not have enough information yet to categorize what has happened as either ethnic cleansing or genocide, but she said "there are strong indications of crimes against humanity."
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