Sudan boosted forces outside a volatile camp for displaced people in Darfur on Tuesday as fears rose of new armed clashes and rebels said the death toll had risen to 36 from fighting a day earlier.
Police thrust inside the impoverished and volatile Kalma in South Darfur on Monday. Casualty figures from the subsequent clashes have been impossible to verify, but the lowest death toll given by residents and rebels was 30 people.
Government security officers called Kalma, which one aid worker said was the size of a small city, a den of outlaws, armed robbers and rebel movements hoarding weapons, ammunition, explosives, narcotics and stolen goods.
“It seems last night [Monday] there was a build-up of security forces around the camp,” one United Nations official said.
A Kalma community leader, Adam Mohamed, said by telephone on Tuesday that more security vehicles surrounded the camp, where conditions for the 80 000 residents were miserable and homes had been washed away by rain.
“The police force will remain in its place until it enters the camp to collect the stockpiled weapons and prevent the rebels from getting inside the camp,” state media quoted the South Darfur security committee as saying.
Five policemen and seven Kalma residents were wounded when gunmen inside the camp opened fire, “compelling” the police to respond, the committee said.
‘The people are suffering’
But Ahmed Abdel Shafie, a commander in the nebulous Sudan Liberation Army that first rebelled against the government in 2003, said the death toll from Monday’s shooting had risen from 27 to 36, with all the victims identified.
They included at least five women and two children, he said.
“The situation is very bad. The people are really suffering,” he said by telephone from Darfur in west Sudan. The people, who live in mud and straw huts, lacked medication and were having to cope with heavy rain, he said.
The United States, which has strained relations with Khartoum, criticised Sudan over the incursion and called for a full investigation.
“We are concerned by indiscriminate weapons fire by Sudanese government forces on the Kalma internally displaced persons camp,” Deputy State Department spokesperson Robert Wood said in a statement.
The joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur said it had evacuated 47 wounded internally displaced persons (IDPs), mostly women and children, and some men to hospital in the nearby town of Nyala overnight.
UN-led peacekeepers were locked in talks on Tuesday over how best to manage the crisis. UN officials said they were informed about wounded IDPs, mostly young men, who refused to be evacuated for fear of being arrested.
But rebels criticised the mission for failing to stop the raid.
“We are very much shocked and disappointed … They shouldn’t allow armed forces into the camps of unarmed civilians,” said Shafie.
On Monday, peacekeepers initially scrapped patrols to Kalma after government forces, armed with a search warrant, requested their help to hunt for weapons and wanted people in the camp. The peacekeeping mission (Unamid) said that violated its mandate.
Unamid has struggled to provide security in Darfur with just over a third of the 26 000 troops they have been promised.
The Darfur issue has caused heightened tensions in Sudan since the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court last month formally asked judges to issue an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir.
The latest violence overshadowed the arrival in Sudan of Djibril Bassole, the new international mediator trying to find a political solution to end five years of war in Darfur. — AFP