Residents of the Kassab Camp for Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) in North Darfur wait to be examined by doctors. Credit: UN Photo/Albert González Farran

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Feb 15 2013 (IPS)

Amidst ongoing violence and continuing humanitarian emergencies in Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile states, the International Crisis Group (ICG) called Thursday for a comprehensive solution to Sudan’s many regional conflicts.

In the first of a series of reports on the subject, the Brussels-based think tank urged the long-ruling National Congress Party (NCP) to sit down with both its armed and unarmed opposition, as well as civil society groups, to forge a transition to a new governance system designed to resolve conflicts between the central government in Khartoum and its restive regions.

It also urged the international community, including the U.N. Security Council, the African Union, and the Arab League, to join the demand for a single, comprehensive solution to Sudan’s multiple conflicts lest the country fragment further 18 months after South Sudan gained its independence.This conflict in Darfur is now 10 years old, and we need to see a renewed effort to bring about stability and peace in this devastated area.

“Unless the government and the international community engage with both the armed and unarmed opposition and achieve a comprehensive solution to Sudan’s chronic problems, the conflicts will continue and multiply, threatening the stability of the entire country,” according to E.J. Hogendoorn, the ICG’s deputy Africa programme director.

The new 55-page report, which focuses primarily on the war between the government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North in South Kordofan, comes as aid groups are reporting growing humanitarian crises in North Darfur, as well as states bordering South Sudan.

Oxfam warned Thursday that tens of thousands of already-displaced people have fled inter-tribal fighting in several areas of a gold-producing region in North Darfur and now lack access to clean water and adequate shelter and sanitation.

It said at least 90,000 people had been displaced in the Jebel Amir area over the past month – more than the number who were displaced in Darfur during all of 2012. The group called on the government to open a key road into the area and permit relief organisations full access.

“This conflict in Darfur is now 10 years old, and we need to see a renewed effort to bring about stability and peace in this devastated area,” said El Fateh Osman, Oxfam’s Sudan country director. “We are struggling to meet already existing needs even as more are pushed into crisis.”

Oxfam’s statement followed an appeal last Friday by the U.S. State Department for the Sudanese government of President Omar Al-Bashir to halt aerial bombings in the region and to “urgently disarm militias” there.

Some of the Arab tribal militias taking part in the current fighting there were allied with the government 10 years ago as part of a scorched-earth counter-insurgency campaign that resulted in the deaths of at 300,000 people, most of them from black African farm communities.

But the ongoing economic crisis faced by the government resulting from the loss of oil revenue that followed South Sudan’s independence has weakened Khartoum’s influence over the militias, some of which have since turned on their former ally and patron not only in Darfur, but also in other regions, including South Kordofan and Blue Nile states where the Bashir government has used tribal militias to fight rebel movements.

Over the 18 months, more than 200,000 people have fled to South Sudan or Ethiopia from those two states, while another half million or more have been displaced internally in areas controlled either by the government or by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), a rebel group with close ties to South Sudan’s government.

In its latest report, ICG said the conflict in South Kordofan, in particular, has reached the state of “strategic stalemate”, exacting a “horrendous toll” on the civilian population.

The SPLM-N, according to the report, has as many as 30,000 soldiers and a large stockpile of weapons, compared to between 40,000 and 70,000 government troops. While the rebels are deeply entrenched in the Nuba mountains, the government controls much of the lowlands where most of the region’s food is grown.

“Government forces have fallen back on their familiar pattern of striking at communities suspected of supporting the rebels, so as to prevent the SPLM-N from living off the surrounding civilian population. Unable to farm, and with the government preventing humanitarian access to insurgency-controlled areas, many civilians have been forced to flee,” the report noted.

Adding to the SPLM-N’s strength, however, is its alliance with the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), a coalition of rebel groups from around the country, and its increasing coordination with the official opposition parties

In its on-again off-again negotiations with the government, according to the report, the SPLM-N has increasingly pressed a national agenda, reflecting the concerns of its SRF partners, while the government has preferred to confine discussions to local issues.

In a major development last month, the SRF signed a “New Dawn Charter” with the National Consensus Forces (NCF), a coalition of all of Sudan’s opposition parties and some civil society groups. The result is a growing national coalition, including both armed and unarmed groups, in favour of a major reform in the way the country is governed.

The international community, according to the report, should engage with the SRF in order both to encourage its evolution “from a purely military alliance to a more representative and articulate political movement” and to facilitate negotiations with Khartoum for a comprehensive solution to Sudan’s regional conflicts.

“Piecemeal power-sharing arrangements, negotiated at different times with divided rebel factions, often encourage further rebellion with the sole aim of obtaining more advantageous concessions from Khartoum,” the report noted.

“If negotiations only partially address the political marginalisation of peripheries, calls for self-determination, still limited in Darfur and Blue Nile but vocal in South Kordofan, will increase.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

In the sprawling settlement of Yida, just south of the Sudan border, more than 20,000 people gathered last December after fleeing battles in the country’s South Kordofan state. Credit: Jared Ferrie/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Dec 12 2012 (IPS)

Reporting on the results of a two-year investigation, on Wednesday the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch presented findings that suggest that the Sudanese government’s aerial bombardment of civilians in the country’s south could amount to crimes against humanity.

“Sudan’s indiscriminate bombs are killing and maiming women, men, and children,” Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said Wednesday. “The international community should end its silence and demand an immediate end to these abuses.”

Since conflict reignited in June 2011 between the Sudanese state and rebels in the Nuba Mountains state of Southern Kordofan, HRW researchers report their evidence suggests that the Khartoum government has “adopted a strategy to treat all populations in rebel held areas as enemies and legitimate targets, without distinguishing between civilian and combatant.”

According to a new report, “This apparent approach lies at the heart of the serious violations of international humanitarian law documented in this report.” Some 900,000 people are estimated to have been effected.

HRW says these populations are living “under siege”, while warning that “The lack of justice for serious crimes committed during the North-South conflict” – which led to the independence of South Sudan in mid-2011 – “and Darfur also appears to have emboldened those engaged in the South Kordofan and Blue Nile conflicts.”

The Darfur comparison is a potent one, given that both Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and Southern Kordofan Governor Ahmed Haroun have warrants out for their arrest by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes committed in Darfur during the genocide carried out between 2003 and 2005.

In part, it was Haroun’s narrow re-election as governor in June 2011 that led to a resumption of conflict between the Sudanese military and a faction of the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLM) that was left in the north after South Sudan voted for its independence.

The events in Darfur, which could have resulted in up to 500,000 deaths, shocked observers around the world – not only for their brutality but also for the lack of international action in response. In recent months, though observers have ratcheted up warnings that a similar sequence of events is again taking place, there appears to be little additional international sense of urgency.

“Clearly genocide”

In fact, the Darfur crisis was only the latest instance of ethnic cleansing to hit Sudan, which has long been wrenched between the Muslim, Arab-descended leaders of the north and the largely Christian black Africans of the south (where much of the country’s oil is located). Between the mid-1980s and 2000, some say that upwards of two million people were killed in a genocide that was likewise focused on the Nuba Mountains.

“What is happening today is a clear reprise of the 1990s, which few if any commentators fail to call genocide – this, too, is clearly genocide, the targeting of people based on their ethnicity,” Eric Reeves, a widely respected Sudan expert based at Smith College here in the U.S., told IPS.

“I think this was clear even in the summer of 2011. If there are body bags and mass graves, you have overwhelming evidence of crimes against humanity. When you have the relentless bombardment of villages and arable land, you clearly have a systematic attempt to annihilate the Nuba.”

While Reeves (who recently made available a trove of his research here) says HRW reporting constitutes the “gold standard” in humanitarian research, he warns that the organisation has severely underestimated the number of casualties in southern Sudan. While the group offers confirmed casualty numbers “in the scores”, Reeves says, “we can be sure the number is actually in the thousands.”

Such a discrepancy appears to be due to the researchers’ refusal to use reporting that hasn’t been thoroughly checked and vetted. While such a practice may be laudable, Reeves worries that the relatively low numbers that result are misleading.

Meanwhile, the violence in the Nuba Mountains, in Southern Kordofan, has received far more attention in recent months, but it appears that the nearby state of Blue Nile could well have the larger humanitarian crisis, though relatively less information on the situation there is available.

HRW reports that around 140,000 refugees have now fled into South Sudan, leaving behind tens of thousands more displaced within Blue Nile. Meanwhile, despite an August agreement that was to have allowed the resumption of humanitarian aid into the area, the report notes that the government continues to blockade the state.

Researchers met families that, over the past two months, had been forced to cut down their food intake to just a single meal every five days.

As in Southern Kordofan, HRW reports that its evidence of “repeated indiscriminate attacks that have harmed civilians and damaged their properties … could amount to war crimes.”

International urgency?

It remains to be seen whether the new chief prosecutor at the ICC, Fatou Bensouda, pushes more aggressively to carry out the pending warrants against Sudanese officials.

On Wednesday, the Sudanese official in charge of Darfur, Amin Hassan Omar, dismissed the ICC as a politicised, neo-colonial entity, and reiterated that his government would not cooperate with its investigations.

Yet thus far, other international processes, including those spearheaded by the United Nations and the African Union, are seen as either ineffectual or nonstarters.

HRW’s analysts characterise the international response as “muted”, having focused particularly on easing tensions between Sudan and South Sudan, which nearly went to war in April.

The organisation calls on multiple international actors – including the United States, European Union, China and Qatar – to “urgently” push the Khartoum government to end all tactics that contravene international law and allow humanitarian access into affected regions, in addition to pushing Sudanese officials to cooperate with the ICC.

On Monday, the United States announced that its special envoy to Sudan and South Sudan, Princeton Lyman, would be stepping down after two years in the position. Although President Barack Obama lauded Lyman’s “tremendous job”, Eric Reeves calls Lyman’s tenure “ineffective”, marked by periods of “spectacular foolishness”.

“He has failed to secure humanitarian access, and everywhere you look there is failure,” Reeves says. “Lyman has done nothing to bring additional pressure to bear in the hopes of change in southern Sudan.”

An eyewitness and village elder stands next to what appears to be a razed grinding mill in Um Bartumbu village. Credit: Photo by Ryan Boyette for Eyes and Ears Nuba.

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 20 2012 (IPS)

An NGO here unveiled new satellite evidence on Friday that would seem to suggest the torching of a village in southern Sudan by state soldiers.

The group, the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP), suggests that the images, coupled with eyewitness testimony and video footage gathered by the organisation, are further proof of crimes against humanity by Khartoum regime.

“Burning civilians out of their homes is a crime against humanity,” Hollywood actor George Clooney, who co-founded SSP in 2010, said in a statement released Friday. “We’ve got irrefutable visual proof of a mass atrocity that happened last year in a village that’s not even on most maps.”

The village is Um Bartumbu, formerly home to around 250 families in South Kordofan, in the Nuba Mountains of southern Sudan. This is an area that has been viciously targeted by the Sudanese government over suspicions of siding with a rebel group, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (North) – the SPLM-N – an affiliate of the secessionist party that now heads the government of independent South Sudan.

According to Jonathan Hutson, with the Enough Project, an anti-genocide watchdog based here in Washington closely affiliated with SSP, the villagers of Um Bartumbu believe they were targeted because they all voted for the SPLM-N’s political party.

According to the story as now pieced together by SSP and local citizen journalists from a group called Eyes and Ears Nuba, in November 2011 a group of Sudanese forces appeared in Um Bartumbu calling themselves Kabita Kabreet, Sudanese Arabic for the Match Battalion.

Evidently, the name refers to the forceful burning of civilian structures in southern Sudan. In an undated cell-phone video obtained in mid-June by Eyes and Ears Nuba, a soldier is reportedly seen saying, “Matches, where are the matches? Burn this house.”

Hutson says that SSP analysts examining infrared satellite imagery found “burn patterns showing that this was a case of serial arson. In images from the beginning of November, you see healthy, unburned trees between apparently civilian infrastructure; but in images from January, 90 percent of those have been burned.”

Following the burning, the Match Battalion is said to have returned to Um Bartumbu sometime between late March and mid-June to loot the village’s mill generator and zinc roofing.

“The razing happened in November 2011, but internally displaced people from the state are still suffering today,” Hutson told IPS.

“They fled to the homes of nearby relatives, but everyone is starving because the government of Sudan has imposed a humanitarian blockade – barely any aid is getting through. Today, their choices are to stay and starve or flee on foot, but it’s at least a seven-day walk to the nearest refugee camp.”

Due to concerted violence and a devastating drought, recent months have seen hundreds of thousands of refugees cross over from southern Sudan into South Sudan and neighbouring countries.

Hutson continues: “It’s time for the international community to fulfil its responsibility to protect civilians who are being burned out of their homes and who face near-daily bombings by their own government.”

Real-time atrocity prevention

Um Bartumbu marks the sixth time that SSP, which describes itself as the world’s first early-warning system for human rights and human security, has documented atrocities along the southern Sudanese frontier. On Wednesday, the organisation released a report on its first 18 months of operation.

“The continuing bombing and starving of the residents of South Kordofan and Blue Nile state must be addressed more forcefully by the United Nations Security Council,” Enough Project and SSP co-founder John Prendergast said on Friday.

“It is not enough to press for a deal between Sudan and South Sudan. There also must be a process dealing with the conflict in Sudan that addresses the political grievances of the people of these regions as well as Darfur and the east.”

The new revelations from Um Bartumbu come just a week after the presidents of Sudan and South Sudan, Omar Al Bashir and Salva Kiir, engaged in direct talks for the first time since the two countries almost went to war over a disputed oil field in late April.

Although the impact of that meeting is yet to be seen, many observers are dismissing of the long-term implications.

“The meeting between the presidents was a meeting between two men facing the consequences of an economic meltdown, both heading for devastating hyperinflation,” longtime Sudan-watcher Eric Reeves, with Smith College, told IPS.

“Until Khartoum recognises that it needs to negotiate with the SPLM-N, I’m afraid we’ll see an ongoing flow of refugees. Instead, Khartoum is continuing its brutal war.”

Referring to the new SSP evidence, Reeves, who has advised the project in the past, continues: “That’s what the Match Brigade is all about. If you destroy villages, render arable fields unusable, the people of southern Sudan have nowhere to go. They’ve missed two planting season and will miss another this fall – they’re starving to death.”

While Reeves is scathing in his assessment of the reaction by international diplomats and governments to the decade-long crisis in Sudan – “slow, diffident, at times disingenuous” – he says that the new satellite imaging work is historic and will eventually prove crucial in bringing members of the Khartoum regime to justice.

“This marks the point where human rights investigations are no longer on the ground. Eventually, we’ll see some of the people involved in these crimes be brought to (the International Criminal Court in) the Hague, and SSP evidence will be used against them – for instance, we’ll be able to identify many of the officers of this Match Brigade,” Reeves says.

“Going forward, we have an extraordinarily important tool for real-time atrocity prevention. This type of work sends a clear warning to regimes that are contemplating military action: your actions will no longer take place in the dark.”