Powell leans toward genocide finding in Darfur

By Arshad Mohammed

WASHINGTON, Sept 9 (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is leaning toward a determination that the violence in the western Sudan region of Darfur constitutes genocide, Bush administration officials said on Wednesday.

The officials spoke as the State Department completed a report that found a pattern of Sudanese government support for Janjaweed militias drawn from nomadic Arabs conducting an ethnically targeted campaign of murder, rape and looting against villagers who largely speak African languages.

“The facts and the law are pretty strong,” said one U.S. official who spoke on condition he not be named because of the sensitivity of the issue ahead of Powell’s testimony on Sudan before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday.

While U.S. officials say a declaration of genocide would not impose significant legal obligations on them, the use of the charged term could influence the diplomatic debate as the U.N. Security Council weighs a U.S.-proposed resolution that threatens oil sanctions if Sudan does not stop the abuses.

There is little appetite in the U.S. government or among other major powers for any international military deployment to try to stop the violence, which the U.N. estimates has killed up to 50,000 people directly or from hunger and disease.

International efforts so far have focused on trying to persuade Khartoum to allow humanitarian aid workers access to the region, where U.S. and U.N. officials say it has made progress, and to stop the violence itself, which it has not.

In addition to addressing the question of genocide, Powell is expected in his Senate testimony to describe a new State Department report on the Darfur violence based on 1,136 interviews with refugees who fled to neighboring Chad.

‘CONSISTENT PATTERN’

“What these interviews have revealed is that there’s a consistent pattern to the attacks,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.

“Government aircraft have been used to bomb villages. 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.” Boucher said, declining to say whether Powell would make a finding of genocide.

One Bush administration official said it was possible Powell would use a less charged term like “acts of genocide.”

A U.S. official familiar with the State Department report said 75 percent of the attacks described by those interviewed involved government forces acting with Janjaweed or alone and 61 percent said they witnessed the killing of a family member.

“We heard a lot of really awful stories of what these people had been through … killings, shootings, abductions, beatings, rapes, burnings, bombings,” the official said.

The Washington-based Coalition for International Justice, a nongovernmental group which provides legal support to war crimes tribunals, collected the data for the State Department in interviews at about a dozen camps in Chad.

“What we have seen and what people have reported is that black Africans are being targeted — men first and in some cases male children are targeted with babies being taken off mothers’ backs,” Stefanie Frease, who led the research, said.

Under the relevant U.N. convention, genocide is broadly defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Parties to the convention agreed to “undertake to prevent or punish” genocide and may call on the United Nations to take appropriate action for its “prevention and suppression.”