Sudan rejects calls for international trials on Darfur

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 8 (AFP) — Sudan on Tuesday again rejected calls to hold any trials over the bloodshed in Darfur outside the country, as the world community looks to shore up a peace deal after Sudan’s long civil war.

Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Taha and SPLM chairman John Garang at the Security Council special session in Nairobi last November (AP).

First Vice President Ali Osman Taha and rebel movement leader John Garang briefed the UN Security Council on last month’s accord, which ended decades of north-south conflict and raised hopes of a comprehensive national peace.

But UN envoy Jan Pronk said there was a stalemate in the separate conflict between the government and other rebels in the western Darfur area, where an international commission said gross human rights violations have occurred.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has called for those responsible to be brought before the International Criminal Court, while the United States wants to see a dedicated war crimes tribunal for Sudan set up in Tanzania.

Taha reiterated the Khartoum government’s opposition to both options, saying Sudan’s courts could handle the matter.

“There are no grounds to warrant taking suspects outside the country,” he told reporters. “It will push things to degenerate rather than to help people reconcile.”

Garang, head of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) that launched civil war against the government in 1983, said the international community’s main focus should first be to stop the ongoing Darfur bloodshed.

“Impunity cannot be let go but I want to focus on the immediate problem. The immediate problem is to achieve peace in Darfur,” he said. “We have a political and moral obligation.”

Tens of thousands have died in the past two years in Darfur, as the government turned to proxy militias known as Janjaweed to violently put down a rebellion against Khartoum.

The Janjaweed are blamed for a scorched-earth campaign of rape and murder that the United States has called a genocide, and Pronk said Khartoum has not lived up to its pledges to bring those responsible to justice.

“Action on human rights — in particular measures to end impunity — have fallen short of what the government has agreed to and what the Security Council has demanded,” Pronk said.

“Those responsible for atrocious crimes on a massive scale go unpunished. Militias continue to attack, claiming they are not part of any agreement. The government has not stopped them,” the UN envoy said.

A UN commission last month said pro-government forces and militias had been responsible for the killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape, pillaging and forced displacement.

Pronk last week said he feared the north-south agreement would fail if the killing in Darfur does not stop. Peace talks on Darfur between the government and rebels were suspended last year, and no date for resumption has been set.

Garang proposed a tripartite force — one-third each from the government, the SPLM and the African Union — to oversee the fragile Darfur ceasefire and end the bloodshed.

“You really do need a robust force in order to be able to sufficiently protect the civilian population,” he said. A small African Union force has already been deployed to Darfur.

Meanwhile the United Nations is planning a roughly 10,000-strong peacekeeping operation in the wake of the north-south peace accord, a landmark deal that ended Africa’s longest-running war.

With that deal concluded, Taha called on the international community to forgive Sudan’s outstanding debt and to lift all trade restrictions and sanctions to help his nation rebuild its infrastructure and economy.

“A prosperous Sudan, at peace with itself and its neighbours, is good for the region, for the continent and the world at large,” he said. He called for generous support for Sudan at an upcoming donors conference in Oslo.