Sudan says more police to shield Darfur refugees
By Felix Onuah
ABUJA, Nigeria, Aug 17 (Reuters) – Sudan plans to double the number of police in Darfur to 20,000, the country’s foreign minister said on Tuesday in the face of fresh reports that marauding Arab militiamen were still preying on stricken refugees.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo put parliament on notice his country could send up to 1,500 troops if necessary to the vast region as part of an African protection force.
Sudan denies charges from rights groups of backing the militias, known as Janjaweed, in a campaign of ethnic cleansing of non-Arabs that has driven over a million people from their homes since rebels in Darfur took up arms early last year.
The U.N. Security Council has given Sudan about two more weeks to prove it has made progress in improving the security situation or face unspecified sanctions.
U.N. special envoy Jan Pronk will tour Darfur with Sudanese officials Aug. 26-29 to check whether Khartoum has met its commitments to begin reining in the militias and ensure aid workers’ access to what the world body says is the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, council diplomats told Reuters.
Pronk is expected to present his findings in New York around Aug. 30. But the council will also get an interim report next Tuesday, despite objections from Pakistan that the extra briefing was intended to embarrass Sudan, the diplomats said.
Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail announced the police plan in Abuja after talks with Obasanjo, the chairman of the African Union.
“The government of Sudan has about 40,000 Arab soldiers in Darfur plus 10,000 police so the AU, whatever number is going to come, they are going to be for building confidence to encourage people to go to their homes,” Ismail told reporters.
“We are going to increase the number of police to maybe 20,000 police in Darfur,” he said.
In Khartoum, a senior Sudanese official said more police had already been sent to Darfur under an agreement with the United Nations to establish safe areas in the vast western region, but he put the total there now at 8,000.
Their role was “to secure the camps for the displaced and to facilitate voluntary return,” Ahmed Mohamed Haroun, the Minister of State for Interior, told reporters:
A U.N. report released last week said police already in Darfur had sexually exploited refugee women in the Abu Shouk camp near el-Fasher.
TROOP PLAN SUBMITTED
Rwanda has sent 155 troops to protect AU monitors in Darfur, with Nigeria preparing to send 153 next week.
Obasanjo asked the Nigerian National Assembly on Tuesday for approval to send as many as 1,500 troops, should the AU go ahead with deploying a proposed multinational protection force. Sudan has said it reserves the right to reject the proposal.
In Geneva, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said 525 refugees from Darfur had been registered in eastern Chad over the past three days, signaling a possible fresh exodus after a two-month lull.
The new arrivals had reported “constant looting” by the Janjaweed who had also blocked people trying to leave, said UNHCR spokeswoman Jennifer Pagonis.
Chadian villagers near the border with Sudan said Janjaweed were also continuing to cross into Chad to plunder and kill.
In the remote village of Sisi, villagers said militiamen had raided as recently as Aug. 8 to rustle 260 cattle.
“They killed a herdswoman that day. Since the start of the trouble they have killed 15 civilians from here,” said Adama Hassan Hamadi, an elderly man who spoke for the village.
The United Nations estimates 50,000 people have been killed in Darfur since early 2003 when fighting broke out between government forces and two rebel groups. The two sides are to meet for talks in Nigeria under AU auspices next Monday.
Patrick Mazimhaka, the AU deputy chairman, estimated on Monday that 1,000 people a day were now dying in the Darfur crisis, mainly from hunger-related diseases.
However, new World Health Organization figures suggested a lower death rate. The WHO’s latest weekly bulletin said health workers in camps for more than 800,000 displaced people had registered 363 deaths in the five weeks up to the end of July.
The bulletin cautioned the figures could not be considered fully representative of the health situation in Darfur, a region the size of France with a population of six million.
(Additional reporting by Emmanuel Braun in Sisi, Chad, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Irwin Arieff at the United Nations)