UN: Darfur security improves, but human rights abuses continue

By MOHAMED OSMAN, Associated Press Writer

KHARTOUM, Sudan, Mar 9, 2005 (AP) — Security in Darfur has improved since last month, the United Nations mission to Sudan said Wednesday, but human rights abuses continue, particularly wide-scale rapes.

A newly arrived refugee woman from the Sudan region of Darfur crosses into Chad in the direction of the improvised Tine refugee camp. (AFP/file).

The mixed assessment of the situation in Darfur, where a bloody ethnic conflict has raged for two years, follows U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s call Monday for the Security Council to move faster to confront the crisis in Sudan.

It also follows a U.N. report accusing Sudanese soldiers, militiamen and other armed men for raping women and girls in Darfur. The Sudanese government concedes sexual violence is a reality in the war-plagued region and has sought African Union help to protect women and punish those responsible.

“The security situation in February was better than in January and the first week of March seems to follow that pattern,” U.N. spokesman Leon Williams told reporters Wednesday.

“It is too early to speak of a trend and many concerns remain,” he said, referring to abductions of relief workers and attacks on commercial trucks.

Williams also repeated concerns raised by Annan’s representative to Sudan, Jan Pronk, who told the United Nations he was worried about the “evil … phenomenon of rape.”

Doctors from the medical relief group Medecins Sans Frontieres treated 500 rape victims between October and mid-February, a fraction of the total number of women believed to have been attacked, the group claimed.

Some 28 percent of victims who sought MSF treatment reported being raped more than once, while more than half were also physically abused.

Sudan’s justice minister reiterated government opposition to international calls for people accused of committing crimes against humanity during the Darfur war being tried abroad.

Sudan is “committed to trying any citizen proven to be involved (in crimes) or against whom there is evidence of involvement in any activities against the law in Darfur, irrespective of his position or status,” Ali Mohammed Osman Yassin was quoted by the official Sudan Media Center as saying.

Yassin made the pledge in a meeting Tuesday with members of the Sudanese Bar Association, during which he said the government has formed an investigative criminal committee.

A dozen of the 15 Security Council members want to refer suspects to the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal, the International Criminal Court. The United States, an opponent of that body, wants them tried in a new tribunal in Tanzania, an idea which council diplomats say has little support.

The African Union is also studying how to bring human rights violators in Darfur to justice.

Darfur’s two-year conflict has killed more than 70,000 people since last March, but the overall death toll is unknown. More than 2 million people have been displaced from their homes.

The conflict began after two non-Arab rebel groups took up arms against the Arab-dominated government to win more political and economic rights for the region’s African tribes. Sudan’s government is accused of responding by backing the Janjaweed in a campaign of wide-scale abuses, including rape and killings, against Sudanese of African origin. The government denies backing the Janjaweed.