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 has accused Israel of bombing a military arms factory, threatening retaliation after a resulting fire killed two people and injured a third.
It was early July 2004, and Darfur was looking like a war zone - massive human displacements of an
estimated one million people, ongoing skirmishes, inclement weather, a parched landscape due to the recurring droughts, and sheer misery everywhere.
The international community is reacting triumphantly following an agreement on Thursday between Sudan and South Sudan to resume oil production and trade, despite the accord’s failure to address two of the situation’s most intractable issues, on border demarcation and control over lucrative oil-producing regions.
In Sudan’s newspaper district in Khartoum East, dozens of people sit beneath the trees sipping tea or reading newspapers. Most are journalists who once worked for the 10 newspapers that were either forced closed by the country’s security services or because of economic constraints that resulted after the government raised printing taxes in an attempt to prevent the media from reporting on anti-government demonstrations.
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.
Ahead of an Aug. 2 deadline, the leaders of Sudan and South Sudan over the weekend engaged in their first direct talks since hostilities spiked in late April.
Within the next nine days, drinking water at refugee camps in South Sudan's Upper Nile state will run dry, warned the aid agency Doctors Without Borders on Tuesday. Meanwhile, refugees continue to stream into the state, as the few camps set up to house to entrants are stretched even further beyond capacity.
The United Nations has warned that despite the austerity measures put in place by South Sudan to deal with its economic woes, humanitarian agencies will have to increase relief efforts in order to keep the country’s poor alive as the financial situation worsens.
In the wake of border tensions, the United Nations is airlifting 12,000 southerners from a Sudanese frontier town into South Sudan. But they are returning home in the midst of an economic crisis that has the U.N. warning it may appeal for more funding to scale up humanitarian operations.