Refugees say Sudan troops, militia worked together

By Andrew Gray

ABECHE, Chad, Aug 2 (Reuters) – Statements from hundreds of Sudanese refugees indicate that militias and official Sudanese forces cooperated closely in violence in the Darfur region targeting African villagers, researchers said on Monday.

The preliminary findings come from a survey of Darfuris who have fled to neighbouring Chad, carried out by the U.S.-based Coalition for International Justice. It has spoken to some 600 refugees in recent weeks and plans to have interviewed 1,200 by mid-August.

The non-governmental group is feeding its research back to the U.S. State Department and says it aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic study of the conflict in Darfur, which has driven more than a million people from their homes.

“It was really an effort to gather statistically reliable information,” Stefanie Frease, head of the Darfur Documentation Project, told Reuters in the Chadian town of Abeche.

Teams organised by the CIJ, including criminal investigators, prosecutors and academics, have been visiting tented camps and unofficial settlements scattered across the Chadian border area, selecting refugees at random for interview.

Frease did not want to be drawn on whether their testimony justified terms such as ethnic cleansing or genocide, as the U.S. Congress has described the violence in Darfur. But she said some trends were already clear.

“There certainly are patterns that are emerging and one of them has been the close coordination between government of Sudan forces and the Janjaweed (militias) in the attacks — (an) extraordinarily high percentage,” Frease said.

INDISCRIMINATE ATTACKS

She also said it seemed clear that civilians had been targeted in attacks on villages and that black African tribes had been singled out for attack by the militias, drawn from the nomadic Arab population.

“It does appear that ethnic groups are being targeted and there’s a sort of indiscriminate nature to the attacks … on villages,” she said. “I don’t want to draw any conclusions but … we’re finding a lot of elements that indicate that a specific ethnic group is being targeted.”

Sudan’s government has denied it controls the Janjaweed and has branded them outlaws.

Violence in Darfur flared in February last year after two rebel groups who speak African languages took up arms against the government, saying it was neglecting the region.

The Washington-based CIJ was founded to provide legal and technical assistance to the U.N. war crimes tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. It also works with similar courts dealing with the conflicts in East Timor and Sierra Leone.

Frease said the information gathered by her researchers could be useful for investigators if war crimes charges were ever brought over the Darfur conflict. But she said that was not the main purpose of the project.

“That’s a bigger decision for the international community to take,” she said of the possibility of holding trials.