Sudan’s foreign minister denied on Friday that government forces are engaged in a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” in the western Darfur region, after a prominent human rights group accused them of driving more than one million black Africans from their homes.
The report on Friday by Human Rights Watch said soldiers and Arab nomadic militiamen, known as janjaweed, have killed thousands of people in a deliberate campaign to drive black African tribes from the Darfur region.
It accused the Arab-dominated government of providing weapons and air support to the Arab janjaweed militia, which often sweeps into villages riding camels and horses, and called on the United States Security Council, meeting on Friday on the Darfur situation, to step in to help stop the bloodshed and look for evidence of crimes against humanity.
Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail, returning to Khartoum from a trip to Kenya on Friday, didn’t specifically mention the Human Rights Watch report but denied any “ethnic cleansing”.
“What is happening in Darfur is neither ethnic cleansing nor genocide,” Ismail told the official Sudan News Agency. “It is a state of war, which resulted in a humanitarian situation.”
Human Rights Watch likened the Darfur situation to the beginning of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when 500Â 000 people were slaughtered by a government-backed, extremist militia. The international community has been widely criticised for not intervening to stop the bloodshed.
“Ten years after the Rwandan genocide and despite years of soul-searching, the response of the international community to the events in Sudan has been nothing short of shameful,” Human Rights Watch said in its 77-page report.
The report drew on a visit to the region by researchers in March and April.
“Together, the government and Arab janjaweed militias targeted the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa [ethnic groups] through a combination of indiscriminate and deliberate aerial bombardment, denial of access to humanitarian assistance, and scorched-earth tactics that displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians,” the group said.
Sudan’s government has denied supporting the janjaweed militia, which it said is defending itself against autonomy-seeking rebels.
But Human Rights Watch said the government not only supports the janjaweed — providing salaries, ammunition and satellite telephones — but it actually created it.
“They organised them and built them up to what they are today,” said Jemera Rome, a Sudan researcher for Human Rights Watch reached by telephone in London. “The janjaweed have offices in the capitals of the three states of Darfur.”
In its report, Human Rights Watch added: “Janjaweed always outnumber government soldiers, but arrive with them and leave with them. It is not clear which force is the commanding force. It is clear that the janjaweed are not restrained, in any way, by the uniformed government forces who accompany them in army cars and trucks.”
The report chronicled attacks on 14 villages in one area between September and February that it said killed 770 civilians, although it presented the attacks as examples, saying many more occurred in the same period. All involved coordinated assaults by the government and janjaweed.
It described men on horseback killing 82 men, women and children in a mosque; a militiaman using racial slurs to insult a three-year-old boy, then shooting him point blank; and janjaweed raping a group of 13 women.
The violence has sent more than one million people fleeing, according to the UN, and about 110Â 000 have crossed the border into Chad, although it is difficult to know the exact number.
“People are scattered along this massive strip 592km long. It’s a race against time to move them before the rains set in” in about 10 days, said Peter Kessler, spokesperson for the UN refugee agency, speaking in a telephone interview from Geneva.
After that, he said, “it will be impossible to get aid to them”.
The Darfur crisis comes as Sudan moves closer to a delicate, internationally brokered peace in a 21-year civil war that broadly pits the Muslim north against the Christian and animist south.
Negotiators have resolved most issues that had held up an agreement, rebel spokesperson Yasir Arman said on Friday.
More than two million people have died in that war.
Darfur, whose conflict is separate, is almost completely Muslim. — Sapa-AP
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