Amnesty International (AI) on Tuesday urged the United Nations Security Council to impose an arms embargo on Sudan to try to end a 20-month conflict in the country’s western Darfur region, where the UN estimates about 70 000 people have been killed.
The London-based rights watchdog said the Security Council, which is due to hold a special session on Sudan in Nairobi later this week, should ”impose a mandatory arms embargo on Sudan to stop supplies of those arms reaching all parties to the conflict in Darfur, including government forces, until effective safeguards are in place to protect civilians from grave human rights abuses”.
In a 48-page report entitled Sudan: Arming the Perpetrators of Grave Abuses in Darfur, AI said a July 30 UN resolution imposing an arms embargo on non-governmental groups in Darfur ”did not establish detailed guidance to effectively implement this partial arms embargo, nor did it establish a specific UN monitoring body to ensure compliance and to investigate violations of the embargo”.
On Monday, New York-based Human Rights Watch also called for an arms embargo on Sudan.
With a 1994 European Union arms embargo still in place, AI appealed to nations to ”immediately suspend all transfers of those arms and related logistical and security supplies to Sudan that are likely to be used by the armed forces or militia for grave human rights violations”.
The report said firms in Russia, China, Belarus and Lithuania have sold planes and helicopters to Sudan ”despite repeated use of such aircrafts to bomb villages and support ground attacks on civilians”.
”Arms-brokering companies from the United Kingdom and Ireland recently attempted to provide the Sudanese armed forces with large numbers of Antonov aircraft and military vehicles from Ukraine and pistols from Brazil,” it added.
China, France, Iran and Saudi Arabia have exported tanks, military vehicles and artillery to Sudan in the past few years, while Belarus, India, Malaysia and Russia have offered military training to Khartoum’s troops.
”Some governments such as Bulgaria, France, Lithuania and the UK have begun to take action to halt the arms flows to Sudan, and the 1994 EU arms embargo is still in place.
”However, other governments show no signs of wanting to halt the arms supplies to Sudan from their countries,” according to a statement accompanying the report.
Darfur, a region the size of France in the west of Sudan, has been plunged into what the UN terms the world’s worst humanitarian crisis since February 2003, when two rebel groups rose up against the government in Khartoum, demanding greater autonomy for their region and a bigger slice of Sudan’s wealth.
The government response was to train, arm and give free rein to an Arab militia called the Janjaweed to crack down on the rebels, drawn mainly from Darfur’s black African population.
Washington has stated that genocide is taking place in Darfur, where, in addition to about 70 000 people killed, about 1,6-million have been forced from their villages and are grouped in refugee camps in Darfur or across the border in Chad. — AFP
