UN report disappoints both sides of Darfur conflict
By Opheera McDoom
KHARTOUM, Feb 1, 2005 (Reuters) – Both Sudan’s government and Darfur rebels criticised a U.N. report which accused Khartoum and allied militias of atrocities in the country’s western region but stopped short of calling the violence genocide.
The U.N. report, released on Monday, recommended that unnamed government officials and militia leaders be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for widespread and systematic abuses, which may constitute crimes against humanity.
Khartoum officials said the report was unfair, emotional and had come to some incorrect conclusions. The two main rebel groups said the report was mistaken and investigators did not visit the worst areas of fighting where mass graves are hidden.
“We are going to show that there are some claims which are false and there are some misreadings of some facts in some situations — therefore as it stands now (the report) is not fair to Sudan,” the head of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) Ibrahim Ahmed Omar told Reuters in Khartoum on Tuesday.
Omar welcomed the fact that the report did not agree with the U.S. assertion that there was genocide in Darfur, where tens of thousands have been killed during a two-year-old uprising. Khartoum will present its comments on the report to the U.N. Security Council before the end of the week.
Justice Minister Ali Mohamed Osman Yassin told Reuters the excessive media coverage and almost continuous visits by dignitaries had influenced the commission in its investigation.
“This made it an emotional rather than realistic investigation,” he said.
“There is also no evidence to back up these claims — they are keeping this evidence hidden from us,” he added.
The commission handed a sealed list of names of suspects responsible for war crimes and a large file of evidence to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to be used if Darfur is taken to the ICC, as it recommends.
Yassin said the government would cooperate with any investigation by the ICC, a move the United States and China would likely oppose. But he said he’d prefer Sudanese courts to prosecute those responsible for crimes.
Sudan is a signatory to the ICC, but has not ratified it. The report said the Sudanese judicial system was not capable of holding suitable trials for the accused.
REBEL REJECTION
The two main rebel groups said the report did not find genocide because it was incomplete.
“If this report says there is no genocide in Darfur then we reject this report,” Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) leader Khalil Ibrahim told Reuters by telephone from his headquarters in the Eritrean capital Asmara.
“There are hundreds of mass graves that the commission did not go to,” he said, adding the decision to stop short of a genocide finding was political because the international community did not want to take action in Darfur.
Abdel Wahed Mohamed al-Nur, leader of the main rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), said he was sure in time the international community would come to realise that there had been a genocide in Darfur.
Nur, a former lawyer, said he would welcome prosecutions against anyone accused of war crimes, including members of his movement. The report also said some rebels were implicated in crimes.
“I hope that anyone and everyone who is accused of committing a war crime will be brought to court,” he said. “Even if I myself am accused I am ready to appear before any court.”
JEM’s Ibrahim denied anyone in his movement was guilty of a crime.
After years of tribal conflict over scarce resources in arid Darfur, rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing the government of neglect and of giving preferential treatment to Arab tribes.
They accuse Khartoum of arming Arab militias, known locally as Janjaweed, to loot and burn non-Arab villages.
Khartoum says it armed some militias to fight the rebels but denies any links to the Janjaweed, calling them outlaws.
TIME FOR UN ACTION
Tom Cargill, Africa expert at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, said he believed the debate over whether genocide took place in Darfur had “distracted from taking measures to actually stop the fighting”.
He said the report was probably right in stopping short of calling it genocide as there did not seem to be an attempt by the government to “destroy an entire people”, even though ethnic cleansing had certainly taken place in Darfur.
James Dyson, Amnesty International spokesman in London, said the genocide debate was secondary to the need for action.
“It’s now time for the Security Council to act. We don’t believe it’s any less worthwhile because they talked about crimes against humanity … the fact that they didn’t define it as genocide is a side issue,” he said.
“Darfur is the worst example but what Sudan is suffering from is a complete lack of justice in many areas. If the United Nations does not take action on Darfur it sends out the message that condones this sort of behaviour from the government. (Additional reporting by Fredrik Dahl in London)