US Official Cites Possible ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Sudan
By Jim Fisher-Thompson
Washington, DC, Feb 26, 2004 (US Department of State) — USAID’s Roger Winter saw “war raging” in Darfur Villages are burning and close to a million people are being displaced in the western Darfur region of Sudan in what a top U.S. government official says may be a case of “ethnic cleansing.”
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Assistant Administrator for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance Roger Winter told journalists February 26, “The question arises: Is this an ethnic cleansing in motion that is taking place there [Darfur]? I don’t have the answer for that — I’m not a human rights lawyer, [but] it sure looks like that.”
He said there is a “new rebellion” taking place in Sudan that has already displaced three-quarters of the 3 million population of Darfur and threatened a fragile peace process under way between the Government of Khartoum and rebels.
“Despite the comments of President Bashir and the [Khartoum] government generally, the war is still raging there [in Darfur],” Winter said. “And it is still the case that government-connected militias are attacking the African populations of the Darfur area. So, in some senses of the word, we see the same Arab-African conflict that we’ve seen in other parts of Sudan.”
The worst part, Winter said, is that the renewed conflict in the three provinces making up Darfur has kept much needed humanitarian food deliveries from reaching the region, which could have far-reaching consequences for the health of people already weakened by decades of conflict.
Returning from a recent trip to Sudan that included a fact-finding visit to Darfur, Winter said: “We have made a tremendous amount of progress and are probably 85 or 90 percent of the way through the peace process as it relates to the war in the south. Therefore, it’s very disheartening to have this massive new … conflict break out in the western [Darfur] part of Sudan.”
Winter served as executive director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees from 1981 to 2001 and is considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on refugee crises. “Arguably, [Darfur] is the major humanitarian crisis in the world today,” he said. “Since November the [Khartoum] government has not allowed humanitarian access to the war-affected population” and very little food and medicine has made it in to the besieged public. “No IDP [internally displaced persons] camp we visited had received any food deliveries,” the official added.
After speaking with refugees in Darfur, Winter said, he found that what is essentially happening is that people are being driven off their land by men on camels and horseback who ride into their villages shooting and chasing them into the bush. “When we asked the people, ‘Who attacked you?’ they said they were popular defense forces and other government-connected militias. If you asked them, ‘Were there any rebels present?’ they uniformly said no.”
What feeds into the ethnic cleansing scenario is the fact that the Khartoum government does not seem to be interested in protecting the Darfur people against the raids, Winter said. “To the best of our ability to ascertain information, it seems that no real steps are being taken by the [Khartoum] government to stop the uprooting and attacking of these civilian populations.”
Winter said USAID was attempting “to undertake to convene in the region the rebels and the government.” He added, “I’ve spoken to five of the key opposition [rebel] leaders from Darfur, including those who have taken up arms against the government … to ascertain if they would attend” a conference aiming at a cease-fire. “They all say yes. We have asked the government over the last two weeks if they would participate in such an event — as of now we have no affirmative answer that they would participate.”
So “we have no solution. We have an American initiative, but we don’t have a solution that can actually bring the two parties together to negotiate a cease-fire that will permit us humanitarian access” to Darfur, Winter declared.
Asked if he really believed ethnic cleansing was taking place in Darfur, Winter said: “It is Arab populations that are doing the displacement and uniformly African populations that are being displaced. There is a problem of competition for resources between Arab nomads who need pasture for their flocks and African farmers that could be fueling the problem. “I don’t know if that [confrontation] legally fits the definition [of ethnic cleansing].”
Winter explained, “These villages [in Darfur] are being burned intentionally.” However, the raiders “are not massacring all the population. Some of the population are killed, people are displaced, they move, but there doesn’t seem to be an attempt to eliminate them lock, stock and barrel as was the case in Rwanda in 1994, which was clearly genocide in its purest form.”
On the other hand, Winter said, “it does seem to me what is happening here [Darfur] may fit the other model, which is the clearance of the population from an area for a possible use of that area by the people who are clearing it. That sounds a lot like ethnic cleansing if people are of a particular group. So, [in Darfur] I would say it sure looks like it to me, but I’m not the one who can make that judgment in a legal context.”
(According to the just-released State Department Human Rights Country Report on Sudan, Sudanese government and government-supported militias “committed serious abuses in response to rebel attacks in the Darfur region during the year, including razing numerous villages. As a result, as many as 3,000 unarmed civilians were killed, more than 600,000 civilians were internally displaced, and an estimated 100,000 refugees fled to neighboring Chad by year’s end.”)
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)