U.S. mulls if Darfur crisis is genocide

WASHINGTON, DC, Aug 05, 2004 (UPI) — U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday he will decide “in the next couple of weeks” if the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region is genocide.

“I have to gather data from people I have in the field now, who are interviewing people, to reach the legal definition of genocide,” he said at the 2004 UNITY convention in Washington. “And I’ll make a judgment in the next couple of weeks as to whether it does or does not meet that test.”

In Darfur, government-backed Arab militia, called Janjaweed, have attacked the local black population, killing more than 30,000 and displacing more than 1 million. Last month, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution calling the violence “genocide.”

U.S. officials are conducting interviews in Chad, where many of the refugees from Darfur fled, to determine the scale of violence. Some 200 interviews have been completed so far and the State Department expects some 1,000 to be completed by the end of the month. Data is being reported back to Washington, which will then make the findings public.