Powell to say Thursday if Darfur deaths are genocide
WASHINGTON, Sept 8 (AFP) — Secretary of State Colin Powell said Wednesday that later this week he will tell a Senate panel whether ongoing killings in Sudan constitute genocide.
Powell is slated to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee early Thursday on the killings in Sudan’s western Darfur region at the hands of pro-government Janjaweed militias, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
Powell “will offer our assessments tomorrow of that report in his testimony,” Boucher said.
The United States said Friday it planned to introduce a new resolution at the UN Security Council dealing with the Darfur crisis as Powell prepared to testify before US lawmakers next week on whether genocide is occurring the strife-torn western region of Sudan.
Following a critical report on Khartoum’s compliance with the council’s demands in an earlier resolution to ease the crisis and rein in pro-government militias accused of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Boucher said Sudan was complicit in several attacks on black African populations there.
“Government aircraft have been used to bomb villages,” Boucher said.
“Trucks with government soldiers and then Janjaweed militias on horseback or on camels arrive in the villages.
“The villages are surrounded. People who flee are attacked and chased down, and the villages are looted and burned. That unfortunately has been a pattern that we’ve seen again and again,” the spokesman said.
On determining whether genocide is being committed, Boucher said, “There’s the facts, there’s the law.
“If there’s an obvious conclusion, you reach that conclusion. If not, than you have to maybe do some interpretation or reach some political judgments. But we’re considering all those factors, first and foremost, the facts and the law,” Boucher said.
Boucher said that in August, a team interviewed 1,136 Sudanese refugees in 19 locations in eastern Chad.
“What these interviews have revealed is that there is a consistent pattern to the attacks that have taken place and have continued, according to the African Union, as late as last week,” he said.
“The goal of the project was to collect systematic and factual information on what has been happening in Sudan in way that will lead us to better understand exactly what’s been going on in these villages, and therefore look at some of the other issues around, like the question of whether it’s genocide.