US seeks to strengthen UN condemnation of violence in Sudan

GENEVA, March 31 (AFP) — The United States will push Europe and Africa for a strong condemnation of the government-sponsored violence in the Darfur region of Sudan, at the UN Human Rights Commission meeting, a US delegate said.

“We must not leave here without strengthening last year’s weak condemnation of the Sudan where presently the worst abuses are taking place,” senator Rudy Boschwitz, head of the US delegation to the annual commission meeting, told journalists.

Last year the European Union and the African Union watered down a text condemning the crimes committed in Darfur, in the western Sudan, by militias supported by the Sudanese government in Khartoum.

After black African rebels in Darfur rose up against Sudan’s Arab-led government, Khartoum turned to proxy militias — the Janjaweed — to put down the rebellion, and those militias have been blamed for a scorched-earth campaign of murder, rape and pillage.

“If it is not strong enough, we hope the European Union will make it stronger, and if they don’t, we will,” said Boschwitz.

“We are hopeful, given what has happened, meaning the continued human rights abuses over the course of the last year that the African Union will come forward with something that is meaningful”.

Earlier at the commission meeting a group of UN experts called for concrete action by the UN Security Council to end the Sudanese civil war where extra-judicial executions, rape, torture, abductions and forced displacement are daily occurrences.

More than 180,000 people have died in the Darfur region over the past 18 months while 1.8 million have been displaced, UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said March 16.