Atrocities in Darfur region ‘very real’ – US
March 20, 2007 (WASHINGTON) — The U.S. said Tuesday that a comment by Sudan’s president denying widespread rape in the Darfur region bore no resemblance to reality, adding that atrocities, including rape, are “very real.”
Despite U.N. estimates that more than 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur and 2.5 million displaced in recent years, President Omar al-Bashir accused the U.S. in an interview broadcast Tuesday of exaggerating evidence of war crimes.
“Yes, there have been villages burned,” al-Bashir said in the interview with the NBC television network recorded Monday. “People have been killed because there is war. It is not in the Sudanese culture or people of Darfur to rape. It doesn’t exist. We don’t have it.”
He accused the U.S. of plotting to gain access to the country’s oil.
“The goal is to put Darfur under their custody,” he said. “Separating the region of Darfur from Sudan.”
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Tuesday that the atrocities, including rape, are well documented.
“It’s very real. We’ve seen it. We have heard firsthand accounts of it,” McCormack said. “To try to brush this aside as mere fabrications of the United States or others is really just misguided. You can find a lot of other words for it, but I’ll just stick with misguided.”
The Hague-based International Criminal Court has accused Sudanese officials and militias of orchestrating massacres, mass rapes and the forcible transfer of thousands of civilians from their homes in Darfur. The U.S. has called the massacres genocide.
Al-Bashir has resisted international calls to strengthen peacekeeping forces in the region. He made clear in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon circulated on Friday that he did not agree to a proposal to send more than 3,000 U.N. military, police and civilian personnel, along with substantial aviation and logistical assets to beef up the 7,000-strong African Union force now on the ground in Darfur.
He also has raised objections to the final stage of a U.N. plan that calls for a 22,000-strong joint U.N.-AU peacekeeping mission.
“We have gotten to a point where we need to look, give a good, hard look at what levers we might use at our disposal in order to convince the Sudanese government to change its position,” McCormack said Tuesday. “Maybe what we need to do is try to change the cost-benefit analysis for them. And that is something that we are looking at actively.”
In a congressional hearing Tuesday, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State James Swan also warned that relief organizations have been forced by rising violence in neighboring Chad to cut their staffing in that country by about half. The violence and reduced manpower has greatly reduced their ability to care for refugees in the whole region, including thousands who have fled Darfur for Chad.
Swan said that the U.S. and allies are pushing the Chadian government to accept an international military force to keep peace between rival political and ethnic groups, but that so far the country’s government has resisted the suggestion.
Swan was speaking at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing focusing on violence in Chad and the Central African Republic, which has received less attention than the conflict in Darfur.
He said that the violence in Darfur has spilled over borders and cannot be treated separately from conflict in the two other countries.
The president of the Central African Republic has already announced that he is willing to accept U.N. peacekeepers as part of a proposed force that would also operate in Chad.
Swan said that given the difficulty of getting countries to contribute large numbers of troops, the U.S. is urging the U.N. Security Council to approve a smaller force backed by heavy equipment including helicopters that would allow troops to respond quickly to outbreaks of violence over a large area.
Violence in Chad has been fueled by economic disparity as a result of oil revenues controlled by the government that are not being distributed. The U.S. is pushing for government reform.
“Because we recognize that poor governance is a major cause of Chadian instability, we have emphasized the importance of democratic reform, respect for human rights, dialogue, and transparent governance,” he said.
(AP)