UN envoy says war crimes likely in Darfur

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 30 (AFP) — A UN envoy told the Security Council that widespread war crimes likely had taken place in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region.

The announcement by Juan Mendez, the UN’s special advisor on the prevention of genocide, came just before Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail was due to address the council to discuss the Darfur crisis.

“Crimes against humanity, war crimes and breaches of the laws of war have probably occurred on a large and systematic scale,” Mendez said in a closed-door briefing with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour.

“Secondly, we do not believe that we have turned the corner on preventing further violations and we must remain vigilant to this end,” he said after a trip to Sudan with Arbour that concluded last week.

Sudan has been under pressure from the international community to rein in the bloodshed in Darfur, its vast western region where an estimated 50,000 people have died and another 1.4 million have been displaced.

The UN Security Council passed a resolution on September 18 threatening sanctions against the government in Khartoum if it does not take steps to disarm the Arab Janjaweed militias behind the violence.

Mendez said that government measures to deal with the matter were “inadequate and inept” and that moves to improve the police presence had “not inspired confidence among the civilian population.”

Sudan called on the militias to help subdue a rebellion that erupted in Darfur in February 2003, as the region’s mainly black and poor residents rose up in anger against the Arab-led government they said had ignored their plight.

Sudanese President Omar el-Beshir, in an interview with an Egyptian newspaper on Thursday, accused the United States of backing the rebels “to the hilt.”

In her briefing to the council, Arbour said the Sudanese government had not shown a sense of urgency or an acknowledgement of the magnitude of the human rights crisis.

“In short, my mission came away from Sudan gravely concerned that the government and its security forces, particularly the police and the judicial system, are failing the people of Darfur,” Arbour said.

Most of the displaced have been shunted into squalid and disease-riddled camps where security remains a serious problem and the people are “captives in prisons without walls,” she added.

Arbour pointed to a clear unwillingness on the part of the Sudanese police to protect the civilian populations from further attacks.

“It’s pretty clear that even when the police presence has been considerably increased, it still has virtually no interaction with the camp community and people have no confidence,” she said.

“So it would seem the only way to reverse that lack of trust would be to accompany the Sudanese police force with an international component,” she added.

Arbour said she had interviewed people in the camps who claimed to have recognised their Janjaweed assailants among the ranks of their police guards.

Of the nature of the ongoing violence against civilians, Arbour said it had changed from large-scale assaults to “individual attacks on a massive scale,” especially the rape and murder of women leaving the camps to collect wood.

The police either ignore reports of such attacks or, in some cases, accuse the witnesses of fabricating the incidents, she said.

While praising the efforts of African Union (AU) ceasefire monitors in the region, Arbour said their numbers had to be significantly increased and their mandate expanded to include investigations of human rights violations.

The Security Council resolution also called for beefing up the AU force.

Sudan has argued that it alone is responsible for policing the region and maintaining law and order, insisting that an AU force with a broader mandate would further complicate the situation in Darfur.

“Despite our efforts so far, we must acknowledge that there are many in Darfur whom we have not been able to protect and who are still in grave peril,” Arbour said.

“The Darfur crisis will remain with us for some time. It is too big in scale, and too complex in nature, to disappear anytime soon,” she added.