Kerry calls Darfur crisis a genocide
WASHINGTON, Sept 12 (AFP) — US Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry has called conflict and humanitarian crisis in Sudan’s western Darfur region a “genocide”, repeating calls for US action to halt the killing there.
“The US and the UN Security Council now face a testing moment of truth. They have to decide whether to take action to halt the killing in Darfur or remain idle in the face of the second African genocide in 10 years,” Kerry said late Saturday at a dinner held by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
Thursday, campaigning in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Massachusetts senator had said that the United States could not accept a repeat in Darfur of the killing that occurred in Rwanda in 1994, but he did not use the word genocide.
“If I were president, I know this for sure, I would act now,” he said Saturday. “We simply cannot accept another Rwanda.”
“The government of Sudan must understand that the world will act, if they do not, and that the United States is prepared to support the African Union with crucial capabilities of our own, if necessary, to halt the genocide.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Thursday classified atrocities in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region as genocide and called on the United Nations to launch a thorough probe.
Powell told a Senate hearing that evidence compiled by the United States “concluded that genocide has been committed in Darfur and the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility, and that genocide may still be occurring.”
The government in Khartoum has been accused of arming and backing Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, who have rampaged through Darfur, fighting rebels and targetting local villagers in a deadly scorched-earth campaign.
An estimated 50,000 people have been killed and 1.4 million more uprooted in a campaign against black Africans that started out as an attempt to put down a rebel uprising launched in February 2003.
Sudan’s Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail rejected US charges of genocide in Darfur as a reelection ploy by US President George W. Bush.