Sudanese government doing nothing to stop militia attacks, says Amnesty International

NAIROBI, March 17, 2004 (IRIN) — The government of Sudan has made “no progress to ensure the protection of civilians caught up in the conflict in Darfur”, the rights group Amnesty International (AI) said on Tuesday.

“This is not a situation where the central government has lost control,” said AI. “Men, women and children are being killed and villages are burnt and looted because the central government is allowing militias aligned to it to pursue what amounts to a strategy of forced displacement through the destruction of homes and livelihood of the farming populations of the region.”

AI said it had received information indicating that “the Sudan government is encouraging the actions of the Janjawid”.

Sudanese refugees in Chad had described the Janjawid attacking villages accompanied by soldiers and often wearing army uniforms, it said. Some Sudanese army soldiers had also described how they were following the Janjawid in attacks on villages, which, they said, were clearly civilian targets.

“For the past year, no member of the Janjawid has been arrested or brought to justice for a single unlawful killing,” AI noted.

During an attack by Janjawid on at least 10 villages in the Tawilah District between Kabkabiyah and Al-Fashir in Northern Darfur, between 27 and 29 February, more than 80 people were killed, AI reported.

In Western Darfur, on 6 March, the Janjawid militias with three Land-Cruisers and some 60 men on horseback attacked al-Kuraynik, east of Al-Junaynah, the capital of Western Darfur. They allegedly killed 15 villagers, including a child. Two days later, three children were among 12 people reportedly killed in Aysh Barrah, a village west of Al-Junaynah, near the border with Chad.

In Gukor, not far from Al-Junaynah, at least 5,000 fleeing villagers were said to be gathered without food, shelter or medicine, while the town itself was also occupied by thousands of displaced people. The small town of Murnei, south of Al-Junaynah, was also swollen with refugees, with insufficient food and medicines and no doctor, while diarrhoea and fever were rife and five to 10 people were reported to be dying each day, AI reported.

“The government is still severely restricting humanitarian aid in Darfur, and appears unwilling to address the human rights crisis in the region,” AI added. The international community and the UN, which had succeeded in bringing humanitarian aid to about 30 percent of the displaced populations of Darfur in the past few weeks, were unable to protect the lives and safety of rural population, AI said. “Neither have they been able to reach tens of thousands of people sheltering in rural towns or in the bush with hardly any food and shelter and no medical supplies.”

Meanwhile, the conflict seemed to be spilling over into Chad as the Janjawid made almost daily cross-border raids, AI noted. Within the last week, Chadian soldiers have also crossed into Darfur to rescue stolen cattle from the militias, under a deal between presidents Idriss Deby of Chad and Umar al-Bashir of Sudan.

“Sudan is in violation of its obligations under Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions that requires protected persons, including civilians, to be treated humanely, and explicitly prohibits violence to life and person, in particular murder,” warned AI.