World Court Prosecutor: Darfur A ‘Crime Scene’
UNITED NATIONS - Sudan’s actions in Darfur have helped turn the region into “a crime scene,” the chief U.N. prosecutor charged Thursday, expanding on a scathing report this week that directly linked the government to a feared militia blamed for much of the killing.
“Despite promises and denials, over the last five years, millions of civilians have been targeted by officials who vowed to protect them. Impunity reigns,” International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo told a rapt Security Council.
In the report obtained earlier this week by The Associated Press, Moreno-Ocampo alleged that Sudan’s “whole state apparatus” is implicated in crimes against humanity in the country’s western Darfur region.
According to the report, Sudan during the past six months has not shown any increased cooperation with the court—as is required under international law set by the council—in securing the arrests of people indicted by the court for crimes against humanity in the country’s Darfur region.
Sudan called the allegations fictitious, vicious and harmful to the prospects of peace.
“We have seen it before. The Nazi regime invoked its national sovereignty to attack its own population, and then crossed borders to attack people in other countries,” he told the council. “The evidence shows that the commission of such crimes on such a scale, over a period of five years, and throughout Darfur, has required the sustained mobilization of the entire Sudanese state apparatus.”
He promised to present evidence next month at court headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands, from a lengthy probe by investigators based in neighboring Chad and from more than 100 witnesses in 18 countries.
Up to 300,000 have died in Darfur and 2.5 million have fled to refugee camps since 2003, when local ethnic African rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated central government, accusing it of discrimination. Sudan denies backing the janjaweed militia of Arab nomads, who are accused of the worst atrocities in the conflict.
Costa Rica’s foreign affairs minister, Bruno Stagno Ugarte, urged the council to toughen its stance.
“As time passes, we risk accommodating evil as the graves continue to fill in Darfur,” he said. “The government of Sudan is toying with us, toying with human dignity, toying with the authority of this council.”
This month’s council president, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, called it a “very disturbing report” to which the council will craft a formal response.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also was “deeply concerned” by the report, aides said in a statement.
The allegations and countercharges come just as diplomats from the 15 Security Council nations are visiting Sudan this week to get a firsthand look at the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. The council is also trying to salvage the faltering peace process that ended two decades of civil war between the north and south in 2005.
Sudan’s U.N. ambassador, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamed, accused Moreno-Ocampo of destroying the peace process with his charges.
“We will never submit any of our citizens to be tried in the Hague,” Mohamed said. “Ocampo is destroying the peace process and we demand that this man be held accountable for what he is doing to the peace process in Sudan.”
(AP)
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It would seem that the central issue is being skirted around. The government of Sudan is Muslim. Most of the people being killed are Christian. Most people like to say conflict falls along ethnic and tribal lines but why would Muslims kill their own? Muslims may be bloodthirsty but unless its Sunni vs. Shiite, there shouldn’t be bloodshed of that scale.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:27 pmThis is the kind of ethnic cleansing that Muhammed engaged in during his Medina period. Three tribes of Jews were wiped out in the process. And here we are 14 centuries 270 million victims later and the jihad goes on.
Can I get a f*ck Islam.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:32 pmYou might think that - but go check out what happened in Algeria during their civil war in the 1990’s:
June 5th, 2008 at 9:39 pmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_Civil_War
Most Muslims have been killed by other Muslims - they are at least equal opportunity haters.