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SUDAN: Rights Group Says Top UN Envoy Needed on Darfur

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 12 2006 (IPS) - With the security situation in Darfur deteriorating, a major U.S. human rights group Thursday called on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to appoint a high-level envoy to help negotiate a settlement to the nearly three-year-old violence in western Sudan that Washington has labeled “genocide”.

New York-based Human Rights First (HRF) said such an envoy should be empowered to negotiate with all parties involved in the conflict, including tribal leaders and the government-backed Janjaweed militias, as well as the non-Arab rebel groups and the regime that have been engaged in so far fruitless peace talks under the auspices of the African Union (AU) in Abuja, Nigeria.

HRF, which has worked closely with local human rights organisations active in Darfur and the rest of Sudan, said the proposal had been well received by senior U.N. and U.S. officials and is being considered by the U.N. Security Council as part of a package of measures designed to put an end to the violence that has displaced more than two million people and resulted in the deaths of between 180,000 and 400,000 people.

“A high-level envoy would greatly strengthen the diplomatic process and refocus public attention on efforts to end the killing in Darfur,” said Maureen Byrnes, HRF’s executive director. “Such an appointment would be a visible symbol of renewed and heightened political and diplomatic will to resolve the Darfur crisis.”

HRF’s appeal comes on the eve of a scheduled Security Council session Friday which is expected to take up the situation in Darfur, particularly in light of the lapse of the Dec. 31 deadline set by Annan for concluding the Abuja peace talks.

It also comes in the wake of the leak of a confidential report by a U.N. panel on the current situation. According to the Associated Press, which obtained a copy of the report, it accused both Khartoum and the rebels of blocking peace and committing, along with the Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, widespread human rights abuses, including torture, rape and murder.

The report includes a list of names of individuals the panel considers responsible for the most serious abuses. The Council may impose financial and diplomatic sanctions against such individuals, who are believed to include a number of senior Sudanese government officials, under a resolution it adopted last March.

Last month, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) released an 83-page report of its own, “Entrenching Impunity”, on alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. It said top Sudanese officials, including President Omar El Bashir, should be sanctioned by the Security Council and investigated by the International Criminal Court based in The Hague, Netherlands.

The violence in Darfur began in early 2003 when rebel groups attacked a government army garrison. Khartoum responded by launching a “scorched-earth” counter-insurgency campaign aimed at uprooting the non-Arab, mainly African population throughout the region, both by carrying out its own ground and air attacks against the civilian population and by arming and deploying – sometimes in joint operations – Janjaweed militias.

While HRW and some other rights groups have described the violence as “ethnic cleansing”, U.S. President George W. Bush, as well as the U.S. and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs), has referred to it as “genocide”.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a Boston-based NGO that has conducted a series of missions to Darfur and Chad, where more than 200,000 victims have taken refuge, released its own report Wednesday which reconstructed in detail joint army-Janjaweed attacks on three widely separated villages in Darfur based on the testimony of survivors.

The report, “Assault on Survival: A Call for Security, Justice and Restitution”, demonstrates the thorough and systematic nature of those attacks and concludes that they violated the Genocide Convention.

“(PHR) has paid particular attention to the intense destruction of land holdings, communities, families, as well as the disruption of all means of sustaining livelihoods and procuring basic necessities,” according to the report.

“By eliminating access to food, water and medicine, expelling people into inhospitable terrain and then, in many cases, blocking crucial outside assistance, the Government of Sudan and the Janjaweed have created conditions calculated to destroy the non-Arab people of Darfur in contravention of the (1948 UN) ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’.”

PHR also joined a number of other groups in calling for the Security Council to immediately deploy a multilateral intervention force to join the nearly 7,000 AU monitors already there, and to authorise both groups to use force to protect the civilian population.

In their appeal Thursday, HRF officials stressed that they, too, support increasing and intensifying peacekeeping efforts in Darfur, including giving the AU and any other forces deployed there a stronger mandate to stop violence.

“The problem is the mandate,” Ibrahim Adam Mudawi, who was given HRF’s 2005 human rights defender award, told reporters by telephone from Sudan. “If you are not mandating the force to protect civilians, you are just putting forces over there.”

Without such a mandate, said Mudawi, who chairs the Sudan Social Development Organisation, the AU force “has proven for the past three or four months that it cannot protect even itself”.

In addition to that, however, it was necessary to strengthen the political process, particularly now that the Abuja talks have failed to meet their deadline.

“Our proposal for the envoy is parallel to the many calls to strengthen the (AU) force,” said Neil Hicks director of HRF’s international programmes. “Both the security and the political mechanisms currently in place to respond to the Darfur crisis are insufficient.”

HRF stressed that the envoy should work closely with the AU and U.N. missions in Sudan, as well as Annan’s Special Representative for Sudan, Jan Pronk, in engaging the leaders of all communities in Darfur, as well as the Sudanese government.

“The main problem is that the (Abuja) process is not inclusive,” noted Mudawi. “If you sign a piece of paper in Abuja, what will it mean?”

Noting that renewed violence over the past several months has effectively severed more than 500,000 people from access to international humanitarian assistance, and that some U.N. agencies and relief NGOs have withdrawn personnel due to increased insecurity, HRF stressed that action was urgently needed.

Africa Action, a grassroots advocacy group here, echoed that concern, launching its own campaign Thursday – the 55th anniversary of the ratification of the Genocide Convention – to press the Bush administration to introduce a resolution in the Security Council to deploy a multinational force with a strengthened mandate by early February, the month U.S. Amb. John Bolton will chair the Council.

Administration officials have said the strongest opposition to such a move on the Council is China, a big investor in Sudan’s burgeoning oil industry. Officials said Thursday Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, who has traveled several times to Sudan in the past year, intends to bring up the issue on a trip to Beijing this month.