Sudan FM, UN envoy visit Darfur displaced camp at centre of controversy

KHARTOUM, Nov 11 (AFP) — UN envoy Jan Pronk and Foreign Minister Mustapha Osman Ismail jointly visited a camp for displaced people in the Darfur conflict at the centre of a controversy, the state news agency SUNA reported Thursday.

It said that residents of Serif camp in South Darfur State who had recently been moved from Al-Geer, another camp, told the envoy during Wednesday’s visit that they had been relocated voluntarily.

In Geneva, a United Nations human rights expert on Thursday called on the Khartoum government to immediately halt forced relocations of displaced people in the strife-torn Darfur region of western Sudan.

Walter Kaelin, the UN chief’s representative for the rights of internally displaced people, emphasised that Khartoum was responsible for stopping attacks, even if they were carried out by militia.

“It is the government of Sudan that bears the primary responsibility to ensure the protection of its own people,” Kaelin said in a statement calling on Khartoum “to immediately halt forced relocations and other serious violations”.

Kaelin voiced “grave concern” at reports of Sudanese police storming the Al-Geer camp and a village in northern Darfur to move people, beating civilians and using tear-gas to force them out or onto trucks.

SUNA reported that Hussein Ibrahim Kershoum, a humanitarian aid commissioner for South Darfur, told Pronk that Al-Geer had been set up on private land near Nyala city and close to camps of the security forces.

Serif is now being used to house 534 displaced persons.