U.S. Accuses Sudan of Refugee Abuse
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WASHINGTON – A senior American official yesterday accused the Sudanese regime of dispatching secret police and intelligence officers to refugee camps in Darfur, where they have arrested and in some cases tortured people for talking to visiting delegations.
Speaking to reporters at Foggy Bottom yesterday, the USAID administrator, Andrew Natsios, said, “I would urge the government just to avoid any tensions and withdraw those people. They should not be in the camps. They are making matters worse. They are arresting people at night,” he said.
Mr. Natsios, who returned last week from a trip to the three provinces of Darfur in western Sudan, said he had instructed his charges on the ground to report any instances of retribution against Darfuri refugees with whom he had spoken, after he noticed someone surreptitiously taking photos of people who had shared their stories with him. “They arrest people, they torture some of them. Some of them disappear from the prison system,” Mr. Natsios said, noting that currently aid workers and nongovernmental organizations leave the camps by sundown under U.N. safety rules. “Bad things happen at night,” he said.
The public disclosure that Khartoum has attempted to infiltrate refugee camps with its own military may blunt some of the diplomatic capital the regime could hope to reap by agreeing in principle to allow more African Union peacekeepers on the ground. Yesterday, a U.N. spokesman told reporters in Khartoum that Sudan had agreed to expand the African Union force comprised of approximately 450 soldiers today. Early reports estimate that Nigeria and Rwanda are prepared to send up to 5,000 soldiers to secure the region, although the mandate of that mission has yet to be decided.
America and the leadership of the African Union support a broad mandate for the peacekeeping mission that would allow them to take proactive steps to secure the area. But so far, the Sudanese have only agreed to a very limited mission for the troops to police the refugee camps that Khartoum’s 18-month campaign created.
Mr. Natsios said yesterday that if peacekeepers are not deployed to Darfur soon, there is a potential for great violence from the refugees themselves.
“There is a risk of civil violence,” he said. Mr. Natsios said that part of the rage in the 98 camps that host approximately 1.5 million Darfuri villagers forced out of their homes, is that their cattle was essentially stolen by the Janjaweed. In addition to the slaughter of people, the cattle represented for many of the Darfuris the equivalent of their life savings and were counted on for revenue if the millet harvest went bad in a given year.
“Africans are telling us that if they get the chance they will take revenge,” Mr. Natsios said.
Mr. Natsios said that he supported expanding the role of international aid agencies to act as mediators to help some of the refugees get their cattle back or at least receive compensation for their losses.
“We must deal with the massive transfer of wealth.”
The USAID administrator said that the Janjaweed had destroyed or partially destroyed approximately 750 villages. From overhead photos, he said these village centers, were now overridden with the livestock stolen by the Arab marauders. Earlier this month the State Department released a report based on hundreds of interviews with Darfuri refugees in Chad that concluded there was reasonable evidence that Janjaweed were aided at times by Sudan’s Air Force in their campaign to destroy these villages. Secretary of State Powell also determined this month that the actions of the militias constituted the international legal definition of genocide.
Mr. Powell has been particularly outspoken this week against members of the U.N. Security Council for failing to take the unfolding tragedy in Sudan seriously. On a radio show Tuesday, Mr. Powell singled out Algeria, China, Pakistan, and Russia for abstaining from the latest U.N. resolution that threatened to take measures against Sudan’s oil industry if it did not dismantle the Janjaweed militia of its own creation.
“There are some of these countries that just don’t like the possibility of sanctions, and others that had commercial interests that they thought would not be well served if they voted against Sudan’s interest in this resolution,” Mr. Powell said. “But even those that abstained realize that there’s a serious problem out there and I’m appealing to them in a different way, other than voting for a resolution, since they do have commercial interest in there and they do have influence in there, to use that interest and influence to get the Sudanese Government to do the right thing.”
So far, however, it remains to be seen if Sudan is willing to take those steps. For example, Sudan has rebuffed American requests to arrest Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal. American officials say that Mr. Hilal has not only received protection in recent weeks from Khartoum but has had use of government helicopters. He has even given interviews to Western newspapers.