You have to hand it to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir — unlike most strongmen in the world, he at least has a sense of occasion. This week, while holding a live press conference from Sudan — with reporters from Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Cairo, Beirut and Pretoria, who joined in by video link — he found it necessary to accuse ”the media [of] spreading false information”.
He then proceeded to do the same: ”Counting all those killed in battles between the armed forces, the rebels and the tribes, the number does not reach 9 000,” he said, while the now widely accepted figure of the number killed in Darfur is actually 200 000.
If he is not adept with figures, one does have to praise him — a career soldier who rose to the rank of field marshal –for his ability to detect a threat to his sovereign nation while it is still only a small speck on the horizon: ”It is clear that any forces coming to Sudan under Resolution 1706 are colonising forces,” he said of the proposed hybrid African Union‒United Nations force, which UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announced two weeks ago would be deployed to Darfur with Sudanese approval. ”Any talk that we accepted joint forces is a lie.”
Still, he did not find any paradox in his statement that ”rejection of the resolution doesn’t mean that we reject cooperation with the United Nations”. At one moment I thought the cause of the blue berets had found his unlikely support, but he was talking about the AU forces whose ”helmets should be of green colour, which belongs to the African Union”.
Al-Bashir’s uneasy grasp of figures and proportion was further demonstrated when he shot down talk of deploying a further 17 000 troops to back up the 7 000-odd AU troops currently struggling to bring order to the volatile western region of Sudan. ”The AU force commander asked for two extra battalions, so only two battalions more [are] needed,” he said — this for a country bigger than Western Europe. He then did his best to fuel the high unemployment rates in the world by accusing aid agencies in Darfur of making the situation there worse so that the 14 000 or so aid workers there can keep their jobs.
On a night noteworthy for all its denials, it would have been unjust if Sudan’s eastern neighbour, Chad, was not also mentioned. Although only 24 hours later Chad’s government spokesperson HourÂÂmadji Moussa Doumgor would insist that they ”are in a state of war with forces from Sudan”, al-Bashir said: ”We do not have a single element in Chad.”
In the same week that the Sudanese government has grotesquely downplayed the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, told the UN’s Human Rights Council that the Sudanese government and its proxy militia operating in Darfur were ”responsible for the most serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law”. Arbour also appealed to the Sudanese government to account for its actions in Darfur.
However, a number of African and Muslim members of the UN Human Rights Council, backed by Russia, China and Cuba, questioned the assertion that there was a direct link between the government and the militia, refusing to formalise the Sudanese government’s responsibility for the crisis.
Four million people affected by the conflict in Darfur are currently in need of humanitarian assistance.
Additional reporting by Reuters