Khartoum | Thursday
THE Sudanese government expressed its ”profound regrets” on Wednesday for bombing a southern village and killing civilians, blaming the air strike on a ”technical error.”
According to the UN’s World Food Program (WFP), an Antonov airplane dropped six bombs on the village of Akuem in the southern state of Bahr al-Ghazal, killing two children and wounding a dozen people, just as the local population gathered for a WFP food airdrop.
The foreign ministry pledged in a statement that there would be no repeat of last weekend’s bombing.
The bombing sparked protests from both the UN agency and the United States.
”The government expresses its profound regrets for this deplorable incident which was the result of a technical error and was not a premeditated act,” the ministry said, without elaborating on the ”technical error.”
It said that the government ”expects to take all necessary measures to prevent a repetition of such regrettable incidents.”
The United States on Tuesday strongly condemned the bombing.
”The United States is outraged by the government of Sudan’s aerial strike against a civilian target in the south of the country,” US State Department representative Richard Boucher said in a statement.
”This horrific and senseless attack indicated that the pattern of deliberately targeting civilians and humanitarian operations continues.”
The south of Sudan has depended for years on food aid, as millions of people suffer from drought and forced displacement caused by fighting between the Sudanese army, various militias, and rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), engaged in an 18-year civil war against the Khartoum regime.
Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail said on a visit to Nairobi earlier in the day that Khartoum has made an unconditional ceasefire offer to the southern rebels.
The ceasefire offer, which has already been communicated to the SPLA, would be unconditional, and international observers would be invited to monitor the truce, Ismail said.
Three Antonov aircraft based in the central Sudanese town of al-Obeid, maintained and possibly piloted by Russians, are used by the military to launch occasional bombing raids on rebel-held areas, according to diplomatic sources.
US State Department representative Richard Boucher said the attack had violated a pledge made last month to US special envoy for Sudan John Danforth to end bombings of civilian targets for four weeks.
Shortly after beginning his mission in September, Danforth proposed four confidence-building measures to the combatants: a ceasefire in central Sudan’s Nuba mountains, the creation of ”zones of tranquillity” for relief efforts, an end to forced abduction and slavery, and an end to attacks on civilians.
An accord between government and the SPLA for a ceasefire to allow food to reach the Nuba mountains was signed on January in Switzerland, and its implementation so far has been ”encouraging,” a US diplomat in the region told AFP.
For its part, Khartoum has announced measures to put an end to forced abductions of women and children in the south, which southerners say are carried out with assistance of the authorities.
Prior to Danforth’s arrival on the scene, the Sudanese regime tried for two years to give Washington indications of good conduct, placing under house arrest Islamist ideologue Hassan al-Turabi, accused of supporting terrorism, and opening to the CIA its files on the activities of Osama Bin Laden, who lived in Khartoum from 1990 to 1996.
”To assuage the United States, Sudan carried out a big housecleaning operation, and allowed the Americans to gain a great deal of understanding about Bin Laden in Sudan,” says researcher Antoine Basbous, who directs the French-based Arab Countries Observatory.
”It is difficult to understand in this context why (Khartoum) continues bombing, which run counter to its policies,” Basbous adds.
Faced with possibility of the US extending its campaign against terrorism to Sudan from Afghanistan, General Beshir’s regime repeated at the end of 2001 that it did not support terrorism, and that all its links to Bin Laden had been cut. – Sapa-AFP