U.N. Security Council presses for cease-fire in western Sudan
UNITED NATIONS, April 7, 2004 (AP) — The Security Council threw its weight behind talks aimed at halting a year-old conflict in western Sudan, calling on the government and opposition groups to halt fighting for humanitarian reasons and to settle their dispute politically.
The conflict in the Darfur region has driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in a campaign one U.N. official said was “ethnic cleansing.”
“Every effort has to be made to find a settlement to the conflict, ” Germany’s Ambassador Gunter Pleuger, the current council president, told journalists after the council unanimously passed the statement Friday.
The conflict is “one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, which unfortunately also happens to be one of the most forgotten and neglected humanitarian crises,” Jan Egeland, undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told journalists after he addressed the council.
Mr. Egeland said some 750,000 people have been displaced inside Sudan and tens of thousands of others have sought refuge in Chad. He said that 212 civilians reportedly had been killed in March but that he didn’t have figures for those killed earlier because aid workers had been unable to enter the area.
“What we see is … the systematic depopulation of areas. People are not necessarily killed then. They are moved away,” Mr. Egeland said at a news conference. “I would say it is ethnic cleansing, but not genocide.”
Sudanese forces are killing, raping and forcing civilians from their homes in an effort to suppress an insurgency in western Sudan, an international human rights group said Friday, accusing the government of “crimes against humanity.”
While government troops have participated in the fighting in the western Darfur region, allied Arab militia have carried out the bulk of the attacks against the region’s inhabitants, Muslims of African descent, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report.
Humanitarian workers have reached only about a third of the needy inside Sudan because of violence and restrictions Sudan’s government has placed on access, Egeland said.
Most of the attacks have been committed by a militia group, reportedly with government participation including aerial bombardment, Mr. Egeland said, adding that the government was doing little to stop it.
“Therefore, it seems that it’s being condoned,” he said.
Sudan’s U.N. Ambassador Elfatih Mohamed Erwa said Mr. Egeland’s figures on refugees were inflated and that his claim that the numbers come from staff on the scene contradicts his statement that access is limited. He didn’t offer his own numbers.
Mr. Erwa said the council’s statement would encourage progress at the cease-fire talks in N’djamena, Chad. The talks are being sponsored by neighboring Chad and the African Union, with support from the U.S., the European Union and the U.N.
U.N. humanitarian agencies are appealing for $115 million for people in the Darfur region and another $30 million for refugees in Chad, Mr. Egeland said.
The conflict began in February 2003, when two rebel groups — the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement — took up arms, saying they were fighting for a share of power and wealth in Africa’s largest country.
The insurgency in Darfur intensified as peace talks between the government and a separate group of southern rebels fighting a 21-year-long civil war have inched toward their conclusion. Those talks are being held in Kenya.