UN blames Sudan’s militia for children killing in Darfur
Nov 03, 2006 (GENEVA) — Militiamen supporting the Sudanese government were responsible for the killing of at least 27 children and scores of adults in Darfur this week, U.N. officials said Friday.
The attacks on seven villages and a refugee camp in Western Darfur came to light Thursday when they were condemned by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the violence had “caused scores of civilian deaths and forced thousands to flee the area.”
“The Secretary-General is particularly distressed on hearing reports that 27 of those killed were children under the age of 12,” Dujarric said in New York.
Two U.N. officials in Sudan disclosed Friday that those responsible belonged to the janjaweed, a pro-government militia that has been blamed for the bulk of atrocities in the 3 1/2 year conflict in Darfur.
Government officials could not be reached for comment on Friday, the weekend in Sudan.
“Over a two-day period (Sunday and Monday), the janjaweed attacked eight villages” in Jebel Moon, one of the U.N. officials said in a phone interview with The Associated Press in Cairo. Another U.N. official in Sudan confirmed the janjaweed’s culpability.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. Last month, Sudan’s government expelled the chief U.N. envoy Jan Pronk after he published on his personal Web site that government forces had suffered defeats in Darfur and was deploying militia and troops to the western region in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
The government has always denied backing the janjaweed. But U.N. investigators have found that the government armed the janjaweed, and members of the militia have acknowledged receiving state support.
The U.N. officials said the Jebel Moon area was mountainous and difficult to reach, but that both U.N. staff and African Union peacekeepers had collected firm evidence that the janjaweed was responsible.
An AU official in Darfur said Friday that the African peacekeepers were investigating the latest killings, and how many people had died.
Thousands of civilians were fleeing the area in fear of further attacks, said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the press.
The U.N. mission in Sudan said in an Internet statement Friday the state-appointed governor of Western Darfur had agreed to investigate the attacks. A delegation comprising “state authorities and at least one community leader” had already visited one village, Silea, to begin the inquiry, the U.N. statement said.
More than 200,000 people have been killed and 2,5 million others displaced since the conflict began in February 2003, when Darfur’s ethnic African tribesmen took up arms against what they saw as decades of neglect and discrimination by the Arab government in Khartoum.
A peace agreement signed by the government and one rebel group in May has been ignored, and the violence has escalated in recent months. The accord committed the government to disarming the janjaweed.
The U.N. Security Council voted in August to replace the African Union’s 7,000 troops, an under-powered force, with 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers.
But Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir has refused to allow their deployment, saying they would be “neocolonialists.”
In Beijing on Friday for the China-Africa summit, al-Bashir told reporters that to let U.N. troops into Darfur would lead to more deaths, comparing their deployment to the foreign troops in Iraq.
(AP)