Aid agencies’ rape reports “political”, Sudan says

KHARTOUM, March 8 (Reuters) – Sudan on Tuesday accused three international aid agencies of an orchestrated political campaign to play up the issue of rape in its troubled Darfur region to distract from problems in the rest of the world.

Awatif Abdallah, 19, holds a letter from the police with a medical report scrawled on it saying she was raped and beaten.

State Minister for Humanitarian Affairs Mohamed Yousif Abdalla told reporters it could not be coincidental that Oxfam, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) had all produced reports on rape at the same time.

“It is not normal that, coincidentally, three organisations come together and say one word. This is a kind of political, orchestrated kind of a movement,” he said in Khartoum.

“I feel that it is an orchestrated campaign.”

The Sudanese government has long denied rape has been widespread in Darfur during a 25-month-old rebellion in which tens of thousands have been killed. Rape is a sensitive issue in predominantly Muslim Sudan.

An MSF report on rape obtained by Reuters on Monday produced some of the first medical evidence that at least 500 rapes had occurred in Darfur in the past 4 1/2 months and said the number was likely to be much higher. The government had asked the agency not to release the report.

Abdalla said the aid agencies were trying to attract world attention away from other issues, but did not specify which.

The government has in the past accused the international community of focusing on Darfur, rather than crimes it says the United States and Britain are committing in Iraq.

The government threatened to expel the heads of Oxfam and Save the Children UK last year after they published reports the authorities disagreed with. Oxfam’s head of mission was eventually asked to leave because of visa violations.