US denounces gencide, says rights official to visit Darfur
March 6, 2007 (WASHINGTON) — The continuing genocide in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region was the world’s worst human rights abuse last year, the United States said Tuesday in a global report.
“Genocide was the most sobering reality of all,” the department said in the 2006 “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” noting that mass killings continued to “ravage” Darfur nearly 60 years after the world vowed “Never again!” following the Holocaust.
Just a day before senior U.S. diplomats expect to meet Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum, the State Department lashed out at the Sudanese government, blaming its military and proxy militia for the genocide in Darfur, the western Sudan region where more than 200,000 people have died and some 2.5 million have been displaced, according to some estimates.
Assistant Secretary of State Barry Lowenkron said he would travel to Sudan Thursday to talk with top leaders and visit Darfur.Lowenkron said he planned to spend several days in the western region of Darfur and travel to the southern capital of Juba to monitor implementation of a troubled peace agreement between rebels there and Khartoum before meeting with officials in the capital.
“The Sudanese government and government-backed Janjaweed militia bear responsibility for the genocide in Darfur,” it said, adding that they, along with indigenous rebels, had and continued to commit atrocities as the four-year-old war rages unabated.
“All parties to the conflagration committed serious abuses, including widespread killing of civilians, rape as a tool of war, systematic torture, robbery and recruitment of child soldiers,” the report said.
Washington first declared the situation in Darfur a genocide in 2004 when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word in congressional testimony but other countries and the United Nations have refrained from using the word and some U.S. officials have recently toned down such language.
Tuesday’s blunt criticism, particularly of Khartoum, comes a day before U.S. special envoy for Sudan Andrew Natsios is to see al-Bashir and a week before Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Barry Lowenkron plans to meet the Sudanese president.
Ahead of those talks, expected to focus in part on the deployment of a hybrid United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force to Darfur, the State Department also noted that Sudan has continued to give mixed signals about its acceptance of the mission.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a brief appearance at the State Department, explained the rationale for the report. “We do not issue these reports because we think ourselves perfect, but rather because we know ourselves to be deeply imperfect, like all human beings and the endeavors that they make,” she said. She expressed hope that the report will be a source of information for governments and societies everywhere
(AP)