Human rights activists call for international pressure on Sudan, accused of abuses in Darfur region
By DONNA BRYSON, Associated Press Writer
CAIRO, Egypt, April 5, 2004 (AP) — Sudan’s government sneers at allegations it has resorted to murder and rape of civilians in its campaign to put down a western rebellion, leaving frustrated human rights activists able to do little but increase calls for international pressure on Khartoum.
A decade ago elsewhere in Africa, international action came too late to prevent the deaths of some 500,000 Rwandans, most of them Tutsis killed by their Hutu neighbors in a 100-day genocidal spree.
Leslie Lefkow, who recently traveled to west Africa to study the situation in Sudan for Human Rights Watch, says what has been happening in Sudan’s western Darfur region for the past year differs in scale and context from Rwanda circa 1994, but there are troubling parallels in outsiders’ failure to respond.
Jan Egeland, U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, has said Arab militia groups, reportedly with government backing, are engaged in “ethnic cleansing, but not genocide” against Africans in Darfur. Egeland called the situation “one of the most forgotten and neglected humanitarian crises.”
Sudanese government officials, Lefkow said in an interview Monday, seem to think they can act with impunity in Darfur because the world’s attention is focused on other matters, including an unrelated and longer-standing rebellion in southern Sudan.
“I hope that we can prove them wrong,” she said.
Sudan blames the rebels for the bloodshed in Darfur. A Human Rights Watch report last week laying much of the blame at the feet of the government was dismissed as “mere falsifications and lies compiled by intelligence hirelings” by a pro-government Sudanese human rights activist. Sudan last month accused the departing chief U.N. envoy to Sudan of lying when he described the situation in Darfur as possibly the world’s greatest humanitarian catastrophe.
Human Rights Watch has urged the United States to refuse lifting sanctions on Sudan unless the Darfur violence stops. Washington has said the Darfur crisis must be resolved before U.S.-Sudanese relations can be normal, but indicated sanctions keeping U.S. companies from doing business in Sudan could be eased with the resolution of the 21-year-old the civil war in the south, which has claimed more than 2 million lives.
Elizabeth Hodgkin, a Sudan expert for Amnesty International, said Monday that the world had at first been slow to respond to Darfur, but that political pressure in recent months was beginning to have an affect.
The Sudanese government late last year allowed some international aid workers into Darfur and, however reluctantly, last month began indirect peace talks with the Darfur rebels in N’Djamena, the capital of neighboring Chad.
These talks are being mediated by the Chadian government and the African Union, while U.S., European Union and French officials have observer status.
“We hope that this period of the 10th anniversary of Rwanda will concentrate the minds of the people in N’Djamena,” Hodgkin said, pressing the world “not to make the mistake of not acting.”
Darfur sprawls across a fifth of Sudan — an area the size of Iraq or California –and is home to a fifth of Sudan’s 30 million people, divided mainly between nomads of Arab origin and farmers of African origin. The Arabs and Africans have long clashed over resources in one of Sudan’s least developed regions, where drought and desert creep have shrunk grazing areas.
In February 2003, two ethnic African rebel groups — the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement — took up arms, saying the government, seen as controlled by Sudan’s Arab elite, was marginalizing the region.
Because the Sudanese government has limited aid groups’ and journalists’ access to Darfur, much of the information on the violence there is coming from Sudanese refugees interviewed in Chad.
“The government strategy of closing this off and trying to make it invisible, so far, is working,” said Lefkow. “You don’t have the photographs of the dead children and women who have been gang raped. That I think would spur more attention.”
The Human Rights Watch report, released last week, charged that “militias backed by the government of Sudan are committing crimes against humanity in Darfur.”
The report said indiscriminate bombing, raids by the independent ethnic Arab militia and the army against mainly African villages and denial of humanitarian aid amount to “a strategy of ethnic-based murder, rape and forcible displacement of civilians in Darfur.”
Lefkow, who helped prepare the Human Rights Watch report, puts the number dead in the thousands. According to U.N. figures, 750,000 people have been displaced inside Sudan and tens of thousands of others have fled across the border to Chad.