Sudan rejects US description of Darfur as genocide

BRUSSELS, July 26 (AFP) — Sudan on Monday rejected the use of the term genocide to describe events in its eastern Darfur region in a resolution by the US Congress which called for sanctions against the government in Khartoum.

“What is happening in Darfur is not genocide. It is a humanitarian crisis provoked by fighting which is not our fault … the Sudanese government did not start the fighting,” Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said in an interview published by the Belgian daily De Staandard.

In Washington on Thursday both houses of the US Congress adopted a resolution which declared that “the atrocities unfolding in Darfur, Sudan, are genocide.”

The resolution noted that 30,000 people had been “brutally murdered” in Darfur, 130,000 had fled to neighbouring Chad and more than one million had been internally displaced by the violence.

It urged the administration of US President George W. Bush to “seriously consider multilateral or even unilateral intervention to prevent genocide should the United Nations Security Council fail to act.”

Ismail dismissed the resolution as based on electoral calculations.

“This is an election year in the United States and parliamentarians from both parties are burning to pick up the votes of black Americans and to push themselves forward as defenders of African interests,” he said.

He also asserted that Sudan had responded to a call on Friday from the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, for the government to disarm the Arab Janjaweed militias accused by rights groups of slaughtering civilians in Darfur.

“More than 100 Janjaweed militia members have been arrested,” Ismail told De Staandard.