The Sudanese government could be hit by targeted United Nations sanctions after the publication on Tuesday of a 244-page investigation into the Darfur crisis which detailed horrific and widespread crimes against humanity, including the systematic use of rape as a weapon of terror.
The United States is considering pushing for the sanctions following a four-month investigation which put most of the blame on the Sudanese government and its militia group, the Janjaweed, for the destruction of an estimated 700 villages and violence that has seen tens of thousands of people killed and 1,8-million displaced. The investigators back up their broad conclusions with a series of case studies. They list:
Reports of civilians being thrown on to fires to burn to death and others having been partially skinned. Girls as young as eight were alleged to have been raped.
In Kailek, south Darfur, the report said: ”The commission has heard credible accounts that those captured by the assailants were dragged along the ground by horses and camels from a noose placed around their necks. Witnesses described how a young man’s eyes were gouged out. Once blinded, he was forced to run and then shot dead.”
Investigators interviewed several eyewitnesses at Kailek who confirmed a joint attack by government soldiers and the Janjaweed in which women and children were separated from the men, and both women and children subjected to gang rapes for protracted periods of time. Eighty cases of rape were reported.
The report also identified, but withheld from publication, the names of six members of the central government suspected of having committed international crimes against humanity, eight local government officials and 14 Janjaweed.
Leaks in advance of publication of the report focused on the conclusion that the crimes did not fit the legal definition of genocide. But the report, when read as a whole, shows the investigators regard this as largely academic, given that crimes against humanity have been carried out. The UN security council is to meet shortly to decide whether action should be taken against the Sudanese government.
The French government, which has a permanent seat on the 15-member council, came out firmly on Tuesday in favour of bringing those responsible to the international criminal court in The Hague.
The US is reluctant to make a referral to the ICC, which it has not signed up to, and is pressing instead for a special ad hoc tribunal, similar to the ones for Rwanda and the Balkans. The US state department spokesperson, Richard Boucher, said the US had been talking to other members of the security council ”about further measures, including possible targeted sanctions that the security council might want to adopt given the continuing pattern of atrocities and violence in Darfur”.
A British Foreign Office spokesperson said: ”It is a matter for the UN security council to decide on the best way forward to ensure there is not impunity and bring those responsible to justice.”
However, Britain’s UN ambassador, Emyr Jones Parry, went further. ”The British position is that this is a case that is tailor-made for the international criminal court,” he said in New York. The report concludes: ”There are consistent accounts of a recurrent pattern of attacks on villages and settlements, sometimes involving aerial attacks by helicopter gunships or fixed-wing aircraft, including bombing and strafing with automatic weapons.
”However, a majority of the attacks reported are ground assaults by the military, the Janjaweed, or a combination of the two. Hundreds of incidents have been reported involving the killing of civilians, massacres, summary executions, rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture, abduction, looting of property and livestock, as well as deliberate destruction and torching of villages.”
The patterns ”indicate that the rape and sexual violence have been used by the Janjaweed and government soldiers (or at the least with their complicity) as a deliberate strategy”.
It found credible evidence of rebel forces also being responsible for war crimes, but not comparable with the systematic and widespread pattern of abuses of the government and Janjaweed. – Guardian Unlimited Â