Rights group urges U.N. return monitors to Sudan

CAIRO, April 20 (Reuters) – The United Nations must reinstate human rights monitors in Sudan to document abuses in the troubled western Darfur region, the rights group Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.

Last week U.N. officials said a team of human rights experts sent to investigate charges of ethnic cleansing in Darfur did not get permission to visit the remote region, where rebels took up arms against the Khartoum government in February last year.

Human Rights Watch said Darfur was a critical test of the credibility of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

“With thousands of civilians already killed and hundreds of thousands forcibly displaced, this is exactly the kind of human rights disaster where the commission needs to appoint a monitor,” it said in a statement sent to Reuters by email.

The group said it interviewed some of the more than 110,000 Sudanese refugees encamped in neigbouring Chad and had recorded “widespread and systematic abuses committed in Darfur by government forces acting in complicity with the Arab militias known as Janjaweed”.

Khartoum says the Janjaweed are outlaws, but rebels and observers accuse the government of arming the marauding militias, who loot and burn African farmers’ villages.

A truce between the two rebel groups and Khartoum came into force on April 11, but aid workers say fighting continues in Southern Darfur state, impeding access to those in urgent need.

Human Rights Watch said the U.N. commission was scheduled to vote on a Sudan resolution on Thursday and urged it to reinstate monitors.

The statement said the U.N. commission last year ended a 10-year monitoring mandate in the oil-producing country because it appeared that more than two decades of civil war in the south was approaching resolution.

Talks are taking palce in Kenya to end the southern conflict, which pits the Islamist government in the north against the mainly Christian, animist south.