US says conflict in Darfur is still a Genocide

By: Wasil Ali

August 16, 2007 (WASHINGTON) — The US has reiterated its position on branding the Darfur conflict as genocide.

“We certainly do continue to treat it as genocide” the US State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters today.

Yesterday Britain’s advertising regulator has criticized the Save Darfur coalition for claiming that 400,000 people have died in Darfur, saying the claim was unsubstantiated.

McCormack said that he does not have the latest estimates of the people who died in Darfur.

However he described the Darfur crisis as a “tragedy of monumental and historic proportions”.

The number of people killed in Darfur, which has seen nearly four years of fighting between African rebel forces and the Khartoum government, is the subject of fierce debate. Some studies have put the death toll as high as 400,000 or more, while Sudan’s government claimed last year that only 9,000 had died.

(ST)