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UN warns of worsening situation in Sudan's Darfur

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Security Council discusses violence that has seen tens of thousands displaced this year by new violence in the region.

Darfur has been in turmoil since 2003 when ethnic Africans revolted against the government of President Bashir [Reuters]

Darfur has been in turmoil since 2003 when ethnic Africans revolted against the government of President Bashir [Reuters]

by Al Jazeera

The UN has warned that violent attacks on international peacekeepers and civilians in Sudan’s conflict-torn Darfur region have been increasing, forcing tens of thousands of people from their homes.

Edmond Mulet, UN peacekeeping deputy chief, told the 15-member Security Council on Wednesday that there has been negligible progress in peace efforts for Darfur.

He blamed the second phase of the Sudanese government’s Decisive Summer military campaign to end armed uprisings for causing the new wave of displacement across the region.

Humanitarian organisations have estimated at least 78,000 newly displaced this year, while the UN has unverified reports of 130,000 more, Mulet said.

“There is also significant concern about reports of indiscriminate attacks against civilians” and other human rights violations, he said.

One diplomat speaking to Al Jazeera described UNAMID, a joint mission by the UN and the African Union, as “the most dysfunctional peacekeeping mission in the world”.

“UN officials will tell you privately that the actions of the government of Sudan are one of the reasons why UNAMID is not working,” Al Jazeera’s Diplomatic Editor James Bays reported from the UN headquarters in New York.

“Some will tell you that if UNAMID continues to fail, then eventually the UN should withdraw. But of course that’s exactly what Sudan has made it clear it wants to happen.”

UN chief Ban Ki-moon’s latest progress report on UNAMID said there were 60 “incidents and hostile attacks against UNAMID” in the three months to May 15, compared with 46 in the previous quarter.

The new surge of violence in Darfur comes as the UN holds talks with the government of President Omar al-Bashir on an exit strategy for UNAMID, which has at least 15,000 peacekeepers on the ground.

Sudan ordered UNAMID out of Darfur late last year.

Constraints on force

Abiodun Oluremi Bashua, the acting head of UNAMID, said constraints placed on the peacekeepers by the Sudanese government is one of the reasons they cannot do their job properly.

“We can leave Darfur in a year if the government creates the necessary conditions to make that possible,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Those conditions have to do with the security, the protection of civilians, the guarantees for their protection and their security, their ability to go back home without fearing that they might be attacked or something.

“We also need to have engaged and encouraged governments to address the root causes of the major inter-tribal conflicts.”

The Security Council is due to decide on June 24 on renewing the mandate of UNAMID until next year.

Darfur has been in turmoil since 2003, when ethnic Africans revolted, accusing the Arab-dominated Sudanese government of discrimination.

Rights groups accused the government of retaliating by unleashing Arab armed groups on civilians, a claim the authorities deny.

Hassan Hamid Hassan, Sudan’s deputy UN ambassador, told the Security Council that the violence and displacements were mainly due to tribal clashes and attacks by rebels, not government forces.

Sudan's Bashir re-elected with 94 percent of vote

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Omar al-Bashir, who faces war-crimes charges, declared winner by election commission, extending his 25-year rule.

The Election Commission put turnout at 46.4 percent and denied widespread reports of low participation [Reuters]

The Election Commission put turnout at 46.4 percent and denied widespread reports of low participation [Reuters]

by Al Jazeera

Sudan’s Election Commission says President Omar al-Bashir has won re-election with 94 percent of the vote, extending his 25-year rule despite war-crimes charges and domestic rebellions.

The Election Commission put turnout at 46.4 percent and denied widespread reports of low participation.

Mokhtar al-Assam, the head of the commission, announced the results on Monday, saying reports of low turnout were “not accurate”.

The four-day vote began on April 13. Nearly 13 million people were registered to vote at nearly 11,000 polling centres. Polling stations in the capital, Khartoum, were largely deserted.

Bashir, who took power in a bloodless coup in 1989, is the only sitting head of state facing genocide charges at the International Criminal Court. The charges stem from the conflict in the Darfur region.

Conflict in Sudan's Darfur displaces 41000 in two months: UN

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A Sudanese family takes shelter under their donkey cart at the Kalma refugee camp for internally displaced people, south of the Darfur town of Nyala, Sudan. (AP/UNAMID)

A Sudanese family takes shelter under their donkey cart at the Kalma refugee camp for internally displaced people, south of the Darfur town of Nyala, Sudan. (AP/UNAMID)

Fighting between Sudanese government forces and rebels in parts of Darfur has displaced more than 41,000 people from their homes since late December, the UN said on Thursday.

“Aid organizations have assessed and verified the needs of 41,304 people displaced” by violence in North Darfur state and the Jebel Marra areas in the war-torn region, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in its weekly bulletin.

The head of OCHA’s Sudan office said that the number of displaced people could be higher than the figures, which were collected between the last week of December and February 15.

“There are several localities, basically part of the Jebel Marra Massif, to which we don’t have access. We don’t know how many people have been affected” in those areas, Ivo Freijsen said.

Sudan’s military launched an offensive in Darfur in November in a bid to defeat insurgents who have been battling the government since 2003.

Jebel Marra is a hilly area in North Darfur where much of the fighting has taken place.

An army spokesman denied government troops carried out operations in the area in recent weeks.

“If there are any displacements, maybe it is as a result of previous fighting, more than one month ago. We ourselves never target civilians,” Colonel al-Sawarmy Khaled Saad said.

The Sudanese military launched its offensive — dubbed “Decisive Summer 2” — in November after the end of the rainy season that had rendered road in the region impassable.

Khartoum’s forces have also targeted insurgents in the Blue Nile and South Kordofan areas as part of the operation.

Insurgents in the western region of Darfur rebelled against the Khartoum government in 2003, complaining that they were being neglected and marginalized.

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in the region.

Bashir seized power in a 1989 coup, but won a 2010 election that was criticized by observers for failing to meet international standards and was marred by opposition boycotts.

Some 300,000 people have been killed in the conflict in Darfur, and the region is home to more than two million internally displaced persons, according to the UN.

Fighting between government and rebels in Central Darfur during the same period last year displaced around 14,000 people, OCHA said.

(AFP, Al-Akhbar)

Sudan seizes 13 newspapers as South Sudan threatens journalists

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A Sudanese young man looks at newspapers displayed at a kiosk in the capital Khartoum on February 16, 2015.AFP/Ashraf Shazly.

A Sudanese young man looks at newspapers displayed at a kiosk in the capital Khartoum on February 16, 2015.AFP/Ashraf Shazly.

Sudanese security officers seized the print runs of 13 newspapers on Monday in one of the most sweeping crackdowns on the press in recent years, a media watchdog said.

The National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) seized copies of the dailies — which included pro-government as well as independent titles — “without giving any reasons,” Journalists for Human Rights said.

NISS often confiscates print runs of newspapers over stories it deems unsuitable but it rarely seizes so many publications at one time.

Journalists for Human Rights said that the “rise” in newspaper seizures “represents an unprecedented escalation by the authorities against freedom of the press and expression.”

The editor of Al-Tayar Osman Mirghani confirmed his newspaper’s print run had been seized.

“After the printing was finished, security officers arrived and seized all printed copies without giving any reason for that,” he said.

There was no immediate word from the authorities on why the newspapers had been seized.

The Sudanese Journalists’ Network said it would hold a sit-in outside the government-run press council to protest against the confiscations.

Sudan ranked near bottom, at 172 out of 180, in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) 2014 World Press Freedom Index, published on February 10.

Crackdown in South Sudan

Meanwhile, South Sudan’s government on Monday threatened to silence journalists if they broadcast interviews with rebels involved in the civil war.

“We are shutting you media houses down if you interview any rebel here to disseminate his or her plans and policies within South Sudan,” Information Minister Michael Makuei told reporters.

His comments came after a local radio station broadcast an interview with a top opposition leader.

“If you can go as far as interviewing the rebels to come and disseminate their filthy ideas to the people and poison their minds, that is negative agitation,” he said.

“You either join them, or else we put you where you will not be talking,” Makuei said in the latest threat to press freedom in the world’s newest state.

Rights groups have repeatedly warned that South Sudanese security forces have cracked down on journalists, suffocating debate on how to end a civil war in which tens of thousands of people have been killed in the past 14 months.

Reporters Without Borders this month said South Sudan had slipped down six places on its annual press freedom rankings, listing it as the 125th worst nation out of 180.

It said the war has “hit media freedom hard,” noting that “news outlets were warned not to cover security issues and journalists were unable to work properly because of the war.”

Fighting broke out in South Sudan in December 2013 when President Salva Kiir Mayardit accused his former deputy Riek Machar of attempting a coup, setting off a cycle of retaliatory killings across the country.

War continues despite numerous ceasefire deals.

Over half the country’s 12 million people need aid, according to the United Nations, which is also sheltering some 100,000 civilians trapped inside camps ringed with barbed wire, too terrified to venture out for fear of being killed.

(AFP, Al-Akhbar)

U.S meddling to blame for ‘all Arab world sufferings’ – Sudan president

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Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir (Reuters / Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah)

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir (Reuters / Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah)

by RT

The bloody conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Libya are the result of the interference by the US, which wants to gain control over the rich natural resources of those countries, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir told RT.

“The people in Sudan believe that the since the fall of the Soviet Union [in 1991], injustice and oppression has prevailed around the globe as the US became the sole hegemon and began running things with impunity in many regions, including ours,” Bashir said.

In his interview with RT’s Arabic Channel, the Sudanese president labeled Washington’s policies in Middle East and North Africa as “harmful and destructive.”

“Just look at what’s now happening in Iraq and how it spread to Syria. All the suffering that is going in the Arab world is the work of the US,” he said.

The events in Iraq, Syria and Libya “are the result of the US, the Western meddling; it’s a manifestation of colonialism, which has just one aim to it – establishing control over the region and its natural resources,” Bashir said.

Sudan is constantly coming under pressure from international organizations “due to its firm stance, which is antagonistic toward US policies in the region,” he said.

In the most recent example, Bashir pointed to a UN/African Union Mission investigation into the claims by opposition radio that 200 female residents of the village of Tabit in war-torn Darfur region were raped in November.

The first inquiry revealed that no such crime took place, but “the hegemon [the US] was dissatisfied with such a conclusion and ordered another check,” the president said.

“As for the second investigation, we’re confident that there’s already a report on it prepared beforehand in Washington or New York,” he stressed.

The Tabit investigation, as well as the ongoing International Criminal Court (ICC) inquiry into genocide and crimes against humanity during the War in Darfur “are attempts to break the will of the Sudanese,”Bashir said.

“We’re talking about regime change in Sudan to put in power the new regime that would obey the West,”he said.

The president also called the ICC in The Hague “one of the tools of neo-colonialism, which is trying to [subdue] smaller countries, especially, the ones in Africa.”

“This court is based in Europe, but it only passes judgment on the Africans,” Bashir said.

The war between the government and the militias, accusing the regime of oppression against Sudan’s non-Arabs, began in the country’s western region of Darfur in 2003.

According to UN estimates, the bloody conflict took over 300,000 lives and saw 2 million people displaced. Sudanese authorities put the death toll at around 10,000.

Bashir has been re-elected three times since becoming Sudan’s president since in a 1989 bloodless coup.

In November, he announced that he’ll run for office again in the next election, which scheduled to take place in the country in April.

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