Prominent women plead for action on Sudan’s Darfur
September 5, 2007 (PARIS) — A group of prominent women urged the international community Wednesday to act quickly to deploy international peacekeepers to Sudan’s troubled Darfur region.
They also called for an immediate cease-fire to end the violence that has killed an estimated 200,000 people and displaced another 2.5 million since 2003.
“In Darfur, we have seen a real human catastrophe,” Somali lawmaker Asha Hagi Elmi Amin told journalists at a news conference in Paris. “It is high time for positive intervention to end that unacceptable situation.”
The eight women, who included the former head of the United Nations’ human rights agency, African officials and the singer Angelique Kidjo, visited two refugee camps in neighboring Chad earlier this week.
Under a recent U.N. Security Council resolution, a 26,000-strong joint peacekeeping force from the African Union and the United Nations is to be deployed to the region by the end of the year to replace the beleaguered 7,000-strong African Union mission now in Darfur.
The former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, also a former president of Ireland, pressed for better logistical support of African Union troops currently on the ground in Darfur, saying it was “regrettable that the African Union force has been under-supported.”
Bineta Diop, who heads the humanitarian aid group Femmes Africa Solidarite, said she was aware that the deployment of the hybrid force would take time and that an immediate cease-fire would be the best stopgap solution.
The violence in Darfur began after rebels took up arms against the Arab-speaking central government in 2003, accusing it of discrimination. The government is accused of having retaliated by unleashing Arab militias known as the janjaweed, who have been responsible for much of the violence.
The women spent three days at two refugee camps in neighboring Chad, one sheltering refugees from Darfur and the other Chadians displaced by the conflict. Members of the group said they had seen evidence supporting reports of widespread rape of Darfur women.
“The rapes we hear about, it’s true,” said Diop.
Kidjo, an internationally acclaimed singer from the west African nation of Benin, told reporters the story of a woman she met at one of the camps.
“The janjaweed arrived. The first thing they did was to cut off the head” of the woman’s baby, Kidjo said. “When we are mothers … we think only of how to protect out child and when we can’t do it, it’s worse than rape because we lose all confidence in ourselves.”
Kidjo said she was tired of empty promises by the world’s politicians.
It is time they “show their human side, that they feel close to these women, who could be their wives, their daughters or their mothers,” she said.
(AP)