NGO report details new dimensions of violence after Khartoum attack
By Daniel Van Oudenaren
September 12, 2008 (WASHINGTON) — A Geneva-based rights organization released a report on Friday about the Sudanese government’s security response to a rebel attack on Omdurman in May.
The 30-page report details a pattern of political violence in Sudan’s heartland that is deepening the ethnic divisions that have torn apart Sudan’s farthest western province, Darfur.
The report, issued by the Darfur Relief and Documentation Centre (DRDC), provides witness testimony and a comprehensive account of the aftermath of the Justice and Equality Movement’s (JEM) unprecedented May 10 attack on Omdurman, the largest city in Sudan, which lies opposite Khartoum on the Nile River.
Some hundreds of JEM fighters reached Omdurman on May 10 in a column of 50 to 150 vehicles and entered several districts, including the main market of Souq Libya and residential areas of Umbada, Al-Thoura, and Al-Muhandiseen.
Government forces counterattacked with tanks and helicopter gunships. Residents reported that fighting was continuing on May 12 in the markets of Al-Souq Al-Sha’bi in Omdurman and Al-Souq Al-Arabi, AlG’abat and Al-Huria Street in central Khartoum.
Arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings, summary executions, dubious judicial proceedings, racial violence and restrictions on freedom of the press were widely reported after the rebel attack, but the DRDC report is the most comprehensive account since a June paper by Human Rights Watch, “Crackdown in Khartoum.”
DRDC, a nonprofit group whose members in part come from Darfur, says it is working with its local associates to develop a database on individuals that were arrested and held incommunicado, and the organization provided a sample list of detainees, including many whose whereabouts is still unknown.
“Conservative estimates based on information from released detainees and family members indicated that the number of persons arbitrarily arrested and detained in connection with the 10th May 2008 incidents is more than 4000. Information that DRDC received indicated that the overwhelming majority of these detainees are civilians with no organizational connection with JEM,” says the report.
The arrests by Sudanese security forces of people from western Sudan followed an attack on Sudan’s capital by the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) on May 10, 2008 that left dozens of civilians dead or severely injured.
The report estimates that at least 500 individuals from Darfur, whether civilians or presumed JEM combatants, were summarily executed or extra-judicially killed in the first three days that followed the May 10 attack.
But DRDC cites executions that occurred after that time as well, including a May 19 massacre of eight individuals at a police station. The individuals were arrested in Abu Siid residential area in Omdurman and brought to a police station where relatives soon found them. After visiting with the detainees, the relatives left and returned several hours later to find their bullet-riddled bodies. Police said that these persons were killed in a traffic accident.
Fourteen disappeared persons are among those included in DRDC’s sample lists of detainees. Those targeted in the sweeps were mostly from Darfur and had come to Khartoum seeking work or a university education. DRDC’s report also contains photo evidence of instances of beatings and torture.
In addition to providing details on arrests, executions and torture, the report seeks to establish a broader picture of racially-propagated violence and a dysfunctional judiciary, tying the security crackdown to International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s allegations against President Omar Al-Bashir for his involvement in a campaign of bombing, rape and massacre in villages in Darfur.
DRDC cites Moreno-Ocampo’s statement that “Al-Bashir decided and set out to destroy in part the target groups, on account of their ethnicity. He publicly instructed the army to quell the rebellion and not to bring back any prisoners or wounded.”
Similarly to Al-Bashir’s instructions, a security officer speaking on Sudanese state television on May 11 said, “We have killed many JEM fighters and arrested many others. All those we arrest we kill them.” Bashir was charged on July 14 by the ICC prosecutor with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
One of the most noteworthy legal irregularities in the wake of the rebel attack is that Sudan’s chief justice established “anti-terrorism special courts” through a decree on May 29, which severely restrict the possibility that the accused can bring habeas corpus petitions protesting the grounds for their detention. Other irregularities include the Sept. 3 release on bail of sixteen prisoners, three of whom were members of the Darfur Bar Association, despite the fact that no charges had been filed against them.
The authors of the report warn that “a disturbing repercussion of JEM’s attack against Khartoum is the growing polarization of the Sudanese people along ethnic, racial and regional backgrounds. This polarization seriously threatens the fragile social cohesion as well as political arrangements in the country.”
While a racial strain is evident in Sudanese politics, it is not considered to be the only factor in the current conflict. The root cause of the conflict in Darfur is “wrongly described by some as an issue of race and ethnicity,” writes scholar Abdullahi Gallab in his book “The First Islamist Republic” (Ashgate, 2008). Gallab argues that “the conflict that split the National Congress Party into two antagonistic groups [prompting the Darfur rebellion] is actually another round in the battle within the Islamic middle class in relation to authority.”
In an opinion piece published in Sudan Tribune on May 13, Deputy Chairman of the General Congress of the Justice and Equality Movement Dr. Mahmoud Suleiman implicitly acknowledged racial factors of the conflict while claiming a national agenda for his movement. He compared the current NCP regime to the Rwandan Hutu regime that was responsible for the 1994 genocide. “JEM is an armed rebel movement fighting for just cause of its people. It has national agenda in its political thought, believes Darfur crisis as a symptom of a nationwide endemic disease spread by the current ruling regime in Khartoum.”
Scholar Alex de Waal, in particular, has stressed that JEM is largely limited to the Kobe Zaghawa, a tribe living in Darfur and Chad. By contrast, Suleiman wrote in the Sudan Tribune that “state owned media propaganda that portrays JEM as a sole Zaghawa movement is absurd.”
The DRDC report notes that another dimension of the government response is regional discrimination. Testimony of a university student from the Rizeigat Arab tribe is included in an annex of the paper. The student said that his torturers shouted, “Say that you are Zaghawi or Massalati because your appearance does not look like that of Arabs,” and “Rezegi, Zaghawi, Furawi! You are all westerners [from western Sudan].”
As a consequence of his detention, the student has become a rebel who supports Khalil Ibrahim, the leader of JEM, according to his testimony. In a Nov. 2007 report, International Crisis Group cited the possibility of Arabs in Darfur joining the insurgency. Two branches of the Rizeigat, a nomadic tribe from Darfur implicated with the Janjaweed militias, clashed with each other in early 2007, and some members of the Targam sub-clan told International Crisis Group at the time that they wished to join the Darfur insurgency.
Most of the founders of JEM were young Muslims from black African tribes in Darfur who attended universities in Khartoum. About 400 attackers were killed and 400 captured in the attack on Omdurman, along with 147 vehicles, according government sources cited in the DRDC report.
(ST)