SUDAN: Government Military Planes Bomb Hospital, Killing Eleven

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Mar 6 1998 (IPS) - A Sudanese military plane has bombed a hospital in the rebel-held southern town of Yei, killing 11 people and wounding over 50, according to an aid agency official here.

“Thirteen bombs were dropped on Yei town Thursday morning. One of them hit the hospital resulting in the death of 11 patients including that of a hospital staff,” said an official of the Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) in Nairobi, Kenya.

The official, who declined to be named for security reasons, said the bombs were dropped just when the NPA had plans to renovate the 100-bed hospital. “We were planning to renovate the hospital so as to take up to 200 beds,” he told IPS in a telephone interview here on Friday.

NPA, a non-governmental organisation (ngo), provides health care, school materials and relief aid to territorries held by rebels.

The official, who is a Norwegian national, described the bombing as a great loss to the community. “It was the main hospital in the region,” he said.

The NPA sent a plane to Yei on Friday to evacuate the wounded to the Kenyan town of Lokichokio for treatment, he said.

The bombing has been confirmed by the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). “Antonov planes bombed the town on Thursday morning at 11 a.m.,” an SPLA official told IPS on Friday.

He rejected claims by the Sudanese government that the hospital was being used as military barracks. “Government forces were in Yei before we captured it in March last year,” he said. “Our army is eight kilometres away across the river. And the government knows this very well,” he added.

According to the SPLA, Thursday’s bomb raids were the second within 18 days on the town. “On the 15th of February, Antonov fighter planes attacked a WFP (U.N. World Food Programme) convoy carrying relief food to the starving people in Bahr el Ghazal,” he said.

“During the raid,” he said, “a fuel truck was hit by an Antonov fighter plane resulting in the death of three people.”

The WFP is transporting food from Uganda by road to over 100,000 newly-displaced people — mainly children and women — in the Bahr el Ghazal region of southern Sudan. The displaced are fleeing the civil conflict that flared up in and around the towns of Wau, Aweil and Gogrial during the past two months.

“In fact, the kind of air raids witnessed in Yei is nothing new to us. It occurs almost everyday in southern Sudan,” said the SPLA official.

The most publicised was the one carried out by a group of Antonovs which dropped a total of 12 bombs on Chukudum town, on the border with Kenya on June 17, 1996.

No one was killed during that raid. But the incident revealed the use of a cluster bomb — a deadly weapon which has been outlawed by the Geneva Convention — in the Sudanese conflict.

The Switzerland-based Christian Solidarity International (CSI), which has taken up the case, says more than 17 bombs have been dropped in the region, with a population of 20,000 people, since the conflict broke out in 1983.

“The worst thing is that the people in Chukudum are very frightened. They have stopped cultivating the fields on which bombs fell. Locals fear that many children will be killed by the hundreds of still unexploded mini-grenades which the cluster bomb released over wide areas of Chukudum,” said a statement released here by the group.

More than one million people have died in the South since the SPLA, led by Colonel John Garang, began its insurgency 14 years ago to press its demand for autonomy for the South of Sudan, populated by non-Muslim Blacks. However, it split in 1991, with some leaders calling for the region to break away completely from the Arab and Muslim North.

Since then, factional fighting has resulted in the flight of over 250,000 people to neighbouring Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia.

Efforts to end the conflict have been complicated by regional feuds pitting the Sudan against an alliance of key neighbours — Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea — all of whom have accused Khartoum of harbouring destablising elements.

The three claim that the Islamic fundamentalist regime of Lt- Gen Omar Hassan al Bashir in Khartoum is bent on exporting its brand of Islam to the region.

Relations are especially cool with Uganda which has often charged that the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group seeking to topple the government of President Yoweri Museveni, uses bases in Sudan as a springboard for raids into Uganda.

The Sudanese authorities counter that Uganda is supporting the SPLA in its war against Khartoum.