Woman and 3 girls disappear from Darfur IDPs camps
September 23, 2008 (ALFASHER) — A Bangladeshi police unit serving with the UN-African Union hybrid peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) discovered on Saturday that three girls from Kalma camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) disappeared during the girls’ trip outside of the camp to their farm.
Another disappearance is reported in a separate incident in West Darfur, where a Darfuri woman working for International Medical Corps was arrested by National Security Police on Sept. 6 for possessing a phone number of an opposition political party.
The woman’s father spoke with National Security Police on Sept. 14, but they refused to release the woman and told him later that day that she had escaped from their custody. The man who reported the incident is a teacher in El-Riyad IDP camp, according to UNAMID, which learned of the disappearance during a patrol of IDP camps near El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur.
The UNAMID team in Kalma camp, consisting of the Bangladeshi police unit and additional advisors, learned from a local sheikh that a search party had been sent to the farming area to look for the girls. The sheikh said that Arab nomads have been hiding around the camp, and that government police have not responded to the IDPs’ complaints against them.
Kalma camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) is located near Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, and is home to about 90,000 people. Government forces targeted the camp in an August 25 raid that killed dozens of Kalma residents, prompting the acting governor of South Darfur, Farah Mustafa, to admit that “the police went a little too far in Kalma camp.”
UNAMID decided Sept. 1 to deploy peacekeepers to Kalma camp on a permanent basis, following reports of an increased presence of government police erecting tents at a new location 5 km (3.1 miles) from the camp.
Insecurity in IDP camps in Darfur does not appear to have decreased even as Arab countries have sought to sponsor a peace initiative in Qatar and UNAMID has conducted recent mediation efforts in the camps.
On Sunday UNAMID also learned that three suspected Janjaweed militia members stole 40 goats at Fatta Burno IDP Camp in North Darfur. One Fatta Burno resident was shot in the leg and evacuated to Kutum Hospital by local residents.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, alleges that the government of Sudan committed attacks calculated to drive IDPs into inhospitable camps or wilderness. “My specific job per the UN Security Council was to investigate the Darfur case. …It is a challenge to stop crimes against 2.5 million people,” the prosecutor reiterated in an interview with Sudan Tribune on Monday.
(ST)
Akol Liai Mager
Woman and 3 girls disappear from Darfur IDPs camps
Protection of vulnerable persons such as girls, women, elderly and children from NIF forces and Janjuweed militias is one of the primary objectives of UNAMID in Darfur and I don’t really know who else should protect them from their enemies.
Without doubts, disappearance of people in Sudan is a work of NIF and Janjuweeds.
May be UN need 20 multiply by 1,000 Ocampo and give them Darfur mission.
The news of people disappearing was expected because NIF regime is the one that selected countries where these weak UNAMID came from.
The questions that one can aske UN are, what the different between Yugoslavia – Melosovich and Sudan – Al Bashir?
Why Mr Melosovich was not given a right by UN to ask Russians to deploy their forces as peace keepers in Bosnia and Kosovo as it has given this right to Al Bashir to select for UN the Darfur peace keepers from Muslim countries?
I thought Darfurian were more luckiest than their southern Sudan countr parts when their suffering was addressed earlier by international community than that of southern Sudan.
But it seemed the international community is powerless to act in their favour. The failure of UN made them the same like Southerners who has been slaughtered by Arabs of northern Sudan, middle east and gulf for half a century. What a bad luck?