US official witnesses attack on Sudanese official in refugees camp in Darfur

By RAWYA RAGEH, Associated Press Writer

MORNIE, Sudan, Sep 17, 2004 (AP) — Residents in a camp for Darfur’s displaced beat and injured a government worker Friday after he tried to stop them from complaining to the visiting U.S. aid chief.

U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Andrew Natsios, who as he has toured Darfur this week has pressed the Sudanese government to do more to restore calm, said Friday’s violence sprang from “absolute rage” across the region among the displaced, many of whom blame their government for the violence that forced them from their homes.

They descended on the government official with sticks, shouting that he was no better than the Arab horseman they say attacked them and forced them from their homes and leaving him a bloodied illustration of the rage of Darfur’s displaced.

“Now it’s confirmed in a terrible way that you are clearly dealing with an explosive situation,” said U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Andrew Natsios, who witnessed Friday’s mob attack that injured a civil servant assigned to this giant camp for internal refugees. As he has toured Darfur this week, Natsios has pressed the Sudanese government to do more to restore calm,

While Sudan complains it is being unfairly vilified, international human rights groups, the United States, the European Union and the people of Darfur are becoming increasingly impatient with what they see as a strategy of denial, cover-up and delay.

The impatience was all too evident Friday in Mornie, once a town of 5,000 that has been swelled by 70,000 to 80,000 homeless to become West Darfur’s biggest displaced person camp, located about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) west of Khartoum.

Natsios said that as he spoke to some of displaced, an unnamed official assigned to the camp by Sudan’s Humanitarian Affairs department tried to silence those who were saying they could not return to their homes, as the government has recommended, because they feared more attacks by the Arab militia known as the Janjaweed and their government.

Some in the crowd shouted: “Shut up, you’re Janjaweed! Shut up, you’re government,” and began beating the official with sticks.

The official was conscious but bleeding from gashes across the front and back of his head before aid workers and African Union monitors were able to shove his attackers away.

Last month, a mob in another camp killed an alleged Janjaweed member.

“We were getting reports that there is absolute rage in the camps,” Natsios told reporters after his security whisked him from the camp.

Some of the Natsios’s aides said the official who was beaten or another Sudanese official had been photographing those talking to Natsios Friday. International human rights groups have accused the Sudanese government of detaining people who complain to foreign officials, including U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell during their visits to the region in June, about the situation in Darfur.

“This is outrageous, they’re trying to intimidate them,” Natsios said.

Earlier Friday in the West Darfur capital of Geneina, Habib Makhtoum of the regional Social Affairs ministry claimed that those in the camps who complain are either rebels or had been intimidated into lying by rebels.

Gen. Suleiman Abdullah Adam, West Darfur’s governor, responded with a question of his own when he was asked at a news conference in Geneina Friday whether his Arab-dominated government had orchestrated a scorched earth policy against the Africans of Darfur.

“Do you believe that any government in the world can attack its villagers and its people?” said the general, who spoke to reporters as Natsios sat at his side in Geneina’s rundown VIP airport lounge. Annoyance was evident in his tone.

Sudanese officials have repeatedly denied they backed the Janjaweed and accused the world of exaggerating Darfur’s problems. Some say the West is trying to create an excuse to invade another Arab country. In Egypt earlier this week, Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said Washington was trying divert attention from other hotspots, such as Iraq, before American elections.

The U.N. Security Council is considering a U.S. draft resolution threatening sanctions, singling out the “petroleum sector,” if the Sudanese government doesn’t curb the Janjaweed, start to disarm them and punish those who have committed human rights violations.

Two Darfur rebel groups with roots in the region’s ethnic African tribes rose up in February, 2003, accusing the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum of neglect and discrimination.

The government is accused of trying to squash the rebellion by backing ethnic Arab herdsmen who long have competed with African villagers over Darfur’s scarce resources. The ensuing violence and displacement has been described by the United States as genocide and by the United Nations as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis

The United Nations estimates 50,000 Darfurians have died from disease, violence or malnutrition since the rebellion and backlash began.

At the United Nations Thursday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan accused the Sudanese government of failing to rein in the Janjaweed. He also said that both government forces and rebels in Darfur were guilty of violating a cease-fire.

African Union-mediated talks between the rebels and the government on an overall peace deal broke down earlier this week. The Nigerian hosts and mediators are now pressing the rebels to accept a separate humanitarian accord.

Sudan’s government already has agreed to sign the humanitarian accord guaranteeing access for international relief workers and promising to safeguard the return of refugees. Aid groups had earlier accused the government of blocking their work.

One rebel group, the Justice and Equity Movement, has refused to sign the humanitarian accord, saying existing accords already provide for relief, and that it is impossible to do more before the Janjaweed are disarmed.

The other rebel movement, the Sudan Liberation Army, has yet to formally present its position.