U.S. military considers assessment team for Darfur
WASHINGTON, June 17, 2004 (dpa) — The U.S. military is considering sending a team to Chad to assess conditions for a possible humanitarian mission that would help refugees from Sudan’s strife-plagued Darfur region, a radio report said Thursday.
The Voice of America quoted a senior Pentagon official as saying the U.S. military’s European Command was preparing to send a Humanitarian Assessment Survey Team (HAST) to Chad, where many refugees have fled to avoid the conflict in neighbouring western Sudan.
The ethnic conflict, which has overshadowed the recent settlement of another conflict in the country’s south, has left 30,000 peopled dead and displaced another one million people as Janjaweed militia, reportedly with government backing, attacked black Moslem rebels in the region.
The U.S. team would be similar to the HAST unit sent to Liberia last year as the country faced anarchy. The U.S. European Command, which is responsible for Africa, would send to Chad a team that could include military specialists who eould assess needs for a possible civil-military operation, VOA said.
The official, who was unnamed by VOA, said no decision had been made yet to send out the HAST team. But Pentagon officials indicated they are watching developments there closely.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said Thursday the Sudanese government has denied any involvement in the killings. While the killings of civilians Darfur violated international humanitarian law, Annan said they could not be described as genocide or ethnic cleansing.
Annan said he would visit Sudan in July to look into the humanitarian situation in the region.
U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the Pentagon had not been asked to consider a mission.
In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, United Nations Children’s Agency director Carol Bellamy asked for urgent international help for displaced people in the Darfur region.
“The race is against time to come to the aid of one million internally displaced people before the onset of the rainy season shortly,” said Bellamy.
The rains will bog down aid transports.
She met earlier this week in Khartoum with Sudanese President Omer Hassan al-Bashir, who she said pledged his government would ensure basic services to civilians in Darfur. Sudan is under international pressure to open access for humanitarian groups to the region.
Other U.N. agencies and international organizations, including the Red Cross, were also working in Darfur to avert the deteriorating humanitarian crisis in Western Sudan.