UN rights chief says Sudan “failing” people of Darfur

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 30 (AFP) — The UN’s top rights official accused Sudan of “failing” the people of Darfur and called for an international police presence to curb continued attacks on civilians in the troubled region.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, back from a visit to Darfur, told the UN Security Council that the Sudanese government continued to convey neither a sense of urgency nor an acknowledgement of the magnitude of the human rights crisis in Darfur.

“In short, my mission came away from Sudan gravely concerned that the government and its security forces, particularly the police and the judicial system, are failing the people of Darfur,” she said.

Sudan stands accused of backing the Arab Janjaweed militias which have rampaged through the region, in a conflict that has left an estimated 50,000 people dead and displaced a further 1.4 million — most of them into squalid and disease-riddled camps.

Sudan called on the militias to help subdue a rebellion that erupted in Darfur in February 2003, as the region’s mainly black and poor residents rose up in anger against the Arab-led government they said had ignored their plight.

Arbour was accompanied on her trip by the UN Secretary General’s special adviser on the prevention of genocide, Juan Mendez, who declined to follow the lead of US Secretary of State Colin Powell in qualifying the situation in Darfur as one of genocide.

“That is not my mandate,” Mendez told reporters. “What I told the Security Council was that … we have not turned the corner on preventing genocide from happening in the future, or even the near future.”

Aid officials have said hundreds of people could be dying every day in the Darfur camps from preventable diseases, in what the United Nations has called the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world today.

Describing the camp residents as “captives in prisons without walls,” Arbour pointed to a clear unwillingness on the part of the Sudanese police to protect the civilian populations from further attacks.

“It’s pretty clear that even when the police presence has been considerably increased, it still has virtually no interaction with the camp community and people have no confidence,” she said.

“So it would seem the only way to reverse that lack of trust would be to accompany the Sudanese police force with an international component,” she added.

Arbour said she had interviewed people in the camps who claimed to have recognised their Janjaweed assailants among the ranks of their police guards.

Of the nature of the ongoing violence against civilians in Darfur, Arbour said it had morphed from large-scale assaults to “individual attacks on a massive scale,” especially the rape and murder of women leaving the camps to collect wood.

The police either ignore reports of such attacks or, in some cases, accuse the witnesses of fabricating the incidents, she said.

While praising the efforts of African Union (AU) ceasefire monitors in the region, Arbour said their numbers had to be significantly increased and their mandate expanded to include investigations of human rights violations.

The Security Council passed a resolution two weeks ago calling for a beefed up AU force and threatening sanctions against the government in Khartoum if it does not rein in the militias and take other steps to ease the bloodshed and suffering.

Sudan has argued that it alone is responsible for policing the region and maintaining law and order, insisting that an AU force with a broader mandate would further complicate the situation in Darfur.

“Despite our efforts so far, we must acknowledge that there are many in Darfur whom we have not been able to protect and who are still in grave peril,” Arbour told the Security Council.

“The Darfur crisis will remain with us for some time. It is too big in scale, and too complex in nature, to disappear anytime soon,” she added.

Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail was to speak to the council later Thursday.