Rights group accuses Sudan, militia of war crimes
NEW YORK, April 1 (Reuters) – Sudan’s government and Arab militias are waging a joint “scorched-earth” campaign of murder, rape and looting of non-Arab ethnic communities in western Sudan, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday.
“The government’s campaign of terror has already forcibly displaced one million innocent civilians, and the numbers are increasing by the day,” said Georgette Gagnon, deputy director for the Africa division of the New York-based rights group.
A civil war has raged in the south of the giant northeast African country for two decades, claiming more than two million victims. The southern war pits mainly Christian animist south against the Islamic government in Khartoum.
Washington fears that Sudan, destabilized by two decades of civil war, is a haven for Islamic militants. Sudan is on the U.S. list of states suspected of supporting terrorism.
The rights group’s report on the Darfur region said most of the displaced civilians were moved to towns and camps where they were further victimized. Rebel groups, who began an uprising in February 2003, accuse Khartoum of neglecting Darfur and backing Arab militias, but the government says both the militias and the rebels are outlaws.
“In a scorched-earth campaign, government forces and Arab militias are killing, raping and looting African civilians that share the same ethnicities as rebel forces,” the group said in a statement that accompanied the report, “Darfur in Flames: Atrocities in Western Sudan.”
The report accused the military of indiscriminate bombing of civilians and said government troops and militias are destroying villages of ethnic Fur, Masaalit and Zaghawa. Sudan’s two main rebel organizations, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, draw members from those ethnic groups.
Human Rights Watch said Sudan’s government has recruited and armed more than 20,000 militiamen of Arab descent and operates jointly with a militia known as “janjaweed.”
Arab and African communities in Darfur have clashed for decades over land and resources.
The report was published as Khartoum announced the start of peace talks in Chad with mediators trying to end the fighting between government troops and rebels.
A U.N. official said last month that pro-government militiamen were carrying out a Rwanda-style genocide in the region. Khartoum has rejected the allegation.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a statement issued in Chad on Wednesday that he was “very disturbed” by the conflict in Darfur and offered U.N. help in ending it.
Separately, the Sudanese government is involved in peace talks with another rebel group in the south of the vast African country, seeking to end a 20-year-old civil war there.