Sudan’s empty promises to UN

By CLAIRE LEVENSON

Feb 27, 2007 (NEW YORK) — Sudanese humanitarian affairs Minister Mohammad Harun and Janjaweed militia leader Ali Kushayb have been named by the International Criminal Court as war crime suspects in Darfur. But Khartoum’s justice minister declared Tuesday his government does not recognize the ICC as legitimate in Sudan, suggesting that Sudan will therefore not cooperate with the legislative body.

“The naming of suspects does not change our position that the ICC has no jurisdiction to hear these cases,” Justice Minister Mohammad Ali al-Mradi told journalists in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. Although Sudan’s government had promised to end impunity for war crime perpetrators in the Comprehensive Peace Accords of 2005, little progress has been made.

In May 2006, a report by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said Sudanese authorities were failing to uphold their commitments. At that time, the government was unwilling to hold perpetrators of international crimes accountable and the killing of civilians, raping of women continues, according to the UNHCHR report.

“Almost one and a half years after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the government is falling far short of many of the human rights commitments it made,” the report said.

So this latest refusal by Sudanese officials to cooperate with the ICC is part of a long list of broken promises. Since the beginning of the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region in 2003, the Sudanese government has made several oral and written promises to stop the violence — most were not followed by concrete measures.

In this war between the Sudanese military and rebel factions seeking independence, over 200,000 people have died and two million others were displaced from their homes as a result of the conflict. The crisis is spilling over to neighboring countries, especially Chad and the Central African Republic.

U.N. officials have described the situation in Darfur as the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.”

Sudan’s government and the pro-government Arab militias are accused of war crimes against the region’s black African population, although the United Nations has stopped short of calling it genocide.

Khartoum has promised to disarm the Janjaweed militias, end the impunity for those responsible for the worst atrocities, protect Darfur’s internally displaced persons and enable U.N. teams to work freely in the region.

But for years, U.N. agencies have encountered difficulty in providing assistance to refugee camps in Darfur.

The Sudanese government recently denied a U.N. human rights team access to Darfur in spite of a personal pledge from Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Although Bashir said at an African Union meeting in January he would cooperate with Ban, the U.N. team led by Nobel Peace prizewinner Jodi Williams was not granted visas. Ban expressed his disappointment.

“If (Bashir) believes that there is no problem then he should be able to receive the fact-finding mission,” Ban said.

In April 2006, the government refused to let U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland’s plane to land, although Egeland had notified Sudanese authorities in advance and discussed his visit with the minister of foreign affairs.

This lack of cooperation has led U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbor to declare that Khartoum could not be trusted when it came to human rights.

Any initiative by Khartoum to deal with the atrocities committed in Darfur should be dismissed given the involvement of Sudan’s government in those crimes, said Arbor in February 2005.

Sudanese officials have also made declarations in contradiction with previous agreements.

In November, the government had agreed with the United Nations and the African Union to allow U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur to halt the spiraling violence.

But since then, Bashir has rejected this same Security Council resolution, which called for the deployment of approximately 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers and police.

In front of the U.N. General Assembly in September, Bashir characterized the mission as an attempt to colonize Sudan. He said the majority of peacekeeping forces should be African and under the African Union’s command only.

(UPI)