Envoy condemns “unreliable rights reporting”

Sudanese government delegate to the UN, Elfatih Mohamed Ahmed Erwa, has agreed with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that states need to address human rights issues as a tool of conflict prevention, but cautioned against “acceptance of the unequal and unreliable reporting on human rights violations”. Speaking at a UN General Assembly debate on conflict prevention on 12 July, Erwa said NGOs “often worked to inflame conflicts”, that this had happened in Sudan, and that such NGOs should be monitored. Sudan has repeatedly been criticised for its rights record, by human rights and development NGOs among others. Erwa also said the government of Sudan had “supported efforts to allow the inflow of humanitarian supplies”, but that the “actions of the rebels were causing suffering”. He said the main responsibility for conflict prevention lay with individual states, and the main role of the UN should be in supporting states in that role, as well as in sustainable development.

UN Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette, who introduced the report of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the prevention of armed conflict, said the costs of not preventing violence were enormous, not only in terms of damage but also in opportunities lost.
The international community spent about $200 billion on the seven major interventions of the 1990s - in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, the Persian Gulf, Cambodia and El Salvador - and such calculations did not reflect the human cost of war, or the repercussions. The immediate cause of conflict might be an outbreak of public disorder or a protest against a particular incident, but the root causes were more likely to be found in socioeconomic inequities, systematic ethnic discrimination, denial of human rights, disputes over political participation, or long-standing grievances over the allocation of land, water and other resources, she said. Frechette said development assistance - which dropped last year to its lowest level ever - had an important role to play in reducing poverty and inequalities, and enhancing justice, governance, human rights and security. “The time has come to translate the rhetoric of conflict into concrete action,” she added.