US lawmaker seeks peacekeepers on Sudan ‘genocide’
(AFP) – 3 hours ago
WASHINGTON — A senior US lawmaker urged the immediate deployment of peacekeepers to Sudan’s war-torn border region of Southern Kordofan, warning of a risk of “genocide” by government forces.
South Sudan last month broke away from Sudan to become the world’s newest independent nation but violence has persisted in Southern Kordofan, an oil-producing region that remains under Khartoum’s rule.
Representative Chris Smith, who heads the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, on Friday said there were credible signs of systematic attacks by Sudan’s Arab and Muslim forces against the largely Christian Nubian people.
“There has been far too little interest shown and there are no UN peacekeepers to help provide at least some semblance of protection. So the people are just being mowed down,” Smith said in an interview on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” program to air on Sunday.
“We have another potential genocide — certainly mass killing — because of who they are, their ethnicity and their faith,” Smith said.
Smith urged the deployment of peacekeepers, citing the example of another disputed Sudanese region, Abyei, where the United Nations authorized a 4,200-troop Ethiopian force ahead of the independence of South Sudan.
“A deployment immediately could be very effective in mitigating the loss of life,” Smith said.
Smith on Thursday convened an emergency congressional hearing where Andudu Adam Elnail, the Anglican bishop from Southern Kordofan’s capital Kadugli, charged that Sudanese troops were deliberately targeting civilians.
Elnail said forces were going door-to-door to kill perceived rebel supporters. The bishop asked for the assistance of US satellites to identify alleged mass graves.
Smith said that a bombing campaign has also prevented people from tending to crops, meaning that tens of thousands of people risked hunger.
South Sudan’s independence was part of a 2005 peace deal halting a two-decade war that killed two million people. The United States has moved to take Sudan off a blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism as a reward for its cooperation, including its prompt recognition of the South’s independence.
Khartoum has sought better relations with the United States, including a lifting of sanctions, but has insisted that Southern Kordofan is a domestic issue after the implementation of the peace deal.
“A conversation must be had with Khartoum about lifting sanctions, but in the context of ending South Kordofan attacks and all the other human rights abuses that are being committed,” Smith said.
A separate conflict erupted in 2003 in Darfur pitting ethnic rebels against the Arab state. The International Criminal Court has issued an unprecedented arrest warrant for Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir over charges including genocide in Darfur.
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Congressional Hearings Paint Picture of Crisis and Atrocities
By Lily Hough
WASHINGTON, Aug 4, 2011 (IPS) – Witnesses’ chilling depictions of a new Sudanese genocide at an emergency congressional hearing Thursday quelled any remnants of doubt that a humanitarian crisis is unfolding in the Nuba mountain region of South Kordofan.
“It is a war of horror,” Sudanese bishop Andudu Adam Elnail told a House committee here about the systemised ethnic cleansing of the formerly southern allied Nuba people – now the targets of violence in the ethnically divided northern state of South Kordofan.
“Nuba people are fearing,” Elnail said. “They don’t know what is going to happen. They feel they’re forgotten because nothing is going there tangible to rescue them and give them the freedom.”
Elnail’s closest colleagues had told him they witnessed two pits being dug at a school one night, where bodies were later transported to the site, put in “wide body bags” and thrown in the pits – something to add to the heap of evidence piling up in Washington that a decades-old campaign to exterminate the ethnic Nuba has resumed in the wake of the south’s independence.
Elnail added his own accounts of bombs dropping from the sky daily on civilian towns, military forces shelling and burning his neighbourhood – including his own house – and people running to the mountains to hide in caves where they have nothing but “greens” to eat.
“There is more than enough evidence to justify speedy action on the part of the United States government and the international community to address this very dire situation in the Nuba Mountains,” Bradford Phillips, president of the Persecution Project, said.
Phillips and Elnail were joined by a third witness, Dr. Luka Biong, executive director of Kush Incorporated, in making an urgent appeal to members of the Africa, Global Health and Human Rights Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“It’s absolutely essential that the international community bring pressure to bear on the United Nations to immediately declare a humanitarian emergency in the Nuba Mountains and impose a no-fly zone to stop the bombing campaign and allow humanitarian access so that relief flights back into the region may resume,” Phillips added.
Recent accounts that signal ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s border region are inextricably linked to a complex history of violence, stemming from a decades-long intensive military campaign spearheaded by the National Islamic Front (NIF) to Islamise the African indigenous populations in Southern Sudan, the Blue Nile and the Nuba Mountains region of Southern Kordofan state.
The Nuba allied with the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the primary force resisting the NIF and today, southern Sudan’s national army. After a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was forged by the two sides in 2005, with extensive pressure from the U.S., the Nuba were guaranteed a free and fair election to determine their own political future.
But the Nuba have yet to see the promises made by the CPA fulfilled. What’s more, Sudan’s president al-Bashir publicly stated in April that he would smoke the Nuba people out of the mountains using tanks and camels, a move Phllips referred to as a declaration of war and a “clear violation of the CPA”.
Both President al-Bashir and current governor of the Nuba mountains, Ahmed Haroun, are indicted war criminals for their roles in the Darfur genocide.
“These men make Libya’s Gadhafi look like a choir boy. There is no justification in my mind for bombing in Libya while we do nothing in a place like the Nuba Mountains,” Phillips said.
In July, The Satellite Sentinel Project released satellite images consistent with mass graves in South Kordofan that confirmed similar allegations made in a U.N. report draft that was leaked around the same time.
But Princeton Lyman, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, responded instead by contradicting those claims, stating that the satellite imagery and eyewitness accounts provided no clear evidence of mass graves.
“It amazes me how the U.S. and international community is able to tolerate these killers for so long, yet aggressively pursue other villains who have not killed one-one-hundredth of the people whose deaths Omar al-Bashir and his regime are responsible [for],” Phillips said. Another leaked U.N. report indicated that some 7,000 people who had sought refuge with the U.N. Mission in Kadulgi, the capital of South Kordofan, were forced on Jun. 20 to leave the U.N. protective perimetre. The Red Crescent workers who moved them were reportedly disguised members of Khartoum’s security services. Today, the U.N. has no record of those refugees whereabouts.
“That sounds like something out of a bad movie,” Congressman Frank Wolf bellowed at Thursday’s hearing. “The U.N. has failed. The U.N. failed in Rwanda; the U.N. failed in Bosnia; the U.N. failed in Darfur.”
“The U.S. government needs to have a loud voice complaining about what’s happening, and putting pressure on the U.N. to start changing the way they communicate on this as well,” Phillips added.
As the witnesses and committee members called for an end to U.S. diffidence at the emergency hearing, President Barack Obama unveiled new policy plans to strengthen the U.S.’s capacity to respond more swiftly to mass atrocities. Announcing the implementation of the Atrocities Prevention Board Thursday, Obama admitted that even after witnessing the Holocaust and genocide in Rwanda, “the United States still lacks a comprehensive policy framework” for responding to mass atrocities.
“What we fail to do is heed the early warning signs…raise the red flags early,” Tom Andrews, president of the Genocide Intervention Network, told IPS.
That’s exactly what Wolf pleaded for U.S. officials to do in South Kordofan.
“I just wonder how some people in this administration will feel when they leave and they know they missed the opportunity,” he said. “I just don’t want my country to fail.”
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By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press 2011-08-06 07:48 AM |
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An Anglican bishop who fled his home in the South Kordofan region of Sudan accused the Khartoum government on Friday of bombing civilians, blocking humanitarian aid, and committing “ethnic cleansing” against black African Nuba people in the conflict-wracked area.
South Kordofan lies on the border with the newly independent country of South Sudan and has been the site of clashes between government troops from Sudan’s Arab north and forces aligned with the south’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army, and backed by the Nuba.
The Rt. Rev. Andudu Adam Elnail urged the U.N. Security Council to ensure that U.N. peacekeepers remain in South Kordofan to help facilitate a cease-fire that would hopefully lead to a negotiated peace. He also called on the council to pressure the Sudanese government to allow humanitarian organizations into South Kordofan to provide food and medicine to thousands of needy people.
Many inhabitants of South Kordofan fought for the south during the country’s more than two decade civil war against the north and are ethnically linked to the south. Thousands of soldiers in the southern army hail from the fertile and militarized Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan whose people practice Islam, Christianity and animism.
Elnail, the bishop of Kadugli, South Kordofan’s capital, testified Thursday before the House Foreign Relations Committee in Washington and came to New York to lobby members of the Security Council and press his case for urgent action at a U.N. news conference.
“There is a lot of killing going on, and we consider this as ethnic cleansing,” Elnail said. “We call on the international community to investigate.”
Sudan attacked the Nuba people in the 1990s in violence that many labeled a genocide.
Elnail fled Kadugli in early May after his church offices were burned, buildings near his house were shot at, and churches of other denominations were also set on fire. He said he receives regular phone calls and emails from parishoners about bombings, including in fields, which has prevented people from planting crops.
“The government of Sudan is not allowing humanitarian organizations to give any food,” Elnail said, which means many are hungry now and there will be nothing to eat in September or October.
The bishop said witnesses also told him about mass graves of people attacked by government forces. Details about mass graves were also described in an internal June report by Sudan’s U.N. peacekeeping mission obtained by AP. And The Satellite Sentinel Project, a U.S. group, said in report last month that satellite photos appeared to show three large mass graves in the same area in Kadugli.
In late June, representatives from the north’s ruling National Congress Party and southern-aligned opposition forces signed an agreement in Ethiopia aimed at restoring peace in South Kordofan and neighboring Blue Nile state.
But on July 1, Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir said the northern army would continue its campaign in South Kordofan. The northern government insists it is not targeting civilians.
A message left for Sudan’s U.N. ambassador seeking comment on the bishop’s accusations was not immediately answered.
The Sudanese government refused to extend the mandate of the U.N. peacekeeping force that had been monitoring the 2005 north-south peace agreement ending their civil war. It expired when South Sudan became independent on July 9, but peacekeepers are still in South Kordofan wrapping up the mission.
Elnail criticized the Egyptian peacekeepers in South Kordofan, accusing them of not protecting civilians during violence before the mandate expired.
“We need the presence of U.N. in Sudan to monitor the situation so that the cease-fire can be made, and we have access to another negotiation which can bring peace and bring us freedom to the people of Nuba,” Elnail said.
He urged deployment of “neutral” peacekeepers. He also called on the African Union and the Arab League “to consider the situation in the Nuba mountains.”
Witnesses Describe Ethnic Cleansing, Sudan Crisis
Contact: Jeff Sagnip, 202-225-3765, chrissmith.house.gov
WASHINGTON, Aug. 4, 2011 /Standard Newswire/ — Ethnic cleansing, murders, rapes and the growing humanitarian crisis in the Southern Kordofan region of Sudan were described in grisly detail by witnesses testifying at a congressional hearing on Thursday. Congressman Chris Smith (NJ-04) convened the emergency hearing as chairman of the House congressional panel that oversees African issues and international human rights.
Calls were made for the Obama Administration and U.S. State Department, to act to stem the escalating violence. More than 70,000 people have been displaced and an undetermined number of people killed.
“This crisis first arose in June of this year, shortly after the military forces of the Republic of the Sudan attacked the Abyei region,” said Smith, a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and chairman of its Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights. “Whatever the numbers involved, we can be sure that the suffering of the people in Southern Kordofan, especially the Nuba people, has been catastrophic. The testimony presented today by witnesses who have seen the carnage reveal the horrific extent of this situation.” Click here to read Smith’s opening remarks.
The hearing was carried live by CSPAN, and can be viewed on CSPAN’s video website featuring Chairman Smith’s hearing (click here).
Smith’s panel heard from humanitarian organizations working in Sudan about aerial bombardments of civilians, killings and mass displacement of civilians. The hearing, entitled “Southern Kordofan: Ethnic Cleansing and Humanitarian Crisis in Sudan,” focused on the Government of Sudan’s attacks on the Nuba people who live in the southern area of the country, and how the crisis will negatively impact the new nation of South Sudan which declared its independence from the Republic of Sudan only last month.
The U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development were invited to the hearing but did not participate. Smith announced he would be willing to hold a follow-up hearing to hear State Department or USAID testimony on the crisis.
The three witnesses who spoke were (click on names to read their opening testimony): the Rt. Reverend Andudu Adam Elnail, Bishop, Anglican Diocese of Kadugli, Sudan; Bradford Phillips, President of Persecution Project, and; Dr. Luka Biong Deng, Ph.D., President, Kush Inc.
“These are not statistics; these are real people. The only reason they are being exterminated is because they are African. We can’t sit by and watch it happen,” Phillips said. “Mr. President what are you going to do? You know it’s happening; what are you going to do?”
Bishop Andudu said his own Anglican cathedral, offices and home in Kadugli have been ransacked and looted. A member of his congregation reported seeing mass graves less than a mile away. He called on the United States and other members of the international community to begin to “translate moral outrage into effective action” to save lives.
“The Nuba people fear that we will be forgotten, that the world will stand idly by while mass killings continue without redress,” he said. “Our hope is that the United States will lead the international community in taking prompt, effective action to protect tens of thousands of displaced people, including an untold number of civilians being killed house-to-house and bombed by their own government.”
Biong Deng arrived in the U.S. last week directly from South Sudan and gave his own firsthand account of the crisis unfolding in Sudan. He is a former Minister of Cabinet Affairs for the National Unity Government and Minister for Presidential Affairs for the Government of South Sudan.
“There is no doubt what is happening in Southern Kordofan is not only ethnic cleansing but a crime against humanity, and there is a similar pattern of atrocities being committed in the entire border area,” Biong Deng said. “The world has discovered, if impunity is permitted, as evidenced by Darfur and what is now happening in the Southern Kordofan and Abyei area, we shall not have seen the last of such violence only its exportation to other areas and other victims. Given the terrain and denial of access to the affected areas, the humanitarian crisis will get even worse during the next few months. Therefore it is critical for the United States to explore creative options for getting aid to South Kordofan and Abyei.”
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