Human Rights Watch highlights continuing concerns

The US-based organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to renew and extend the mandate of the Special Rapporteur for human rights in Sudan, and for the establishment of monitoring field offices in the country, in the context of what it described as a worsening of human rights in Sudan in many respects.

Such monitors should especially investigate abuses such as forced displacement, summary execution of civilians and captured combatants, attacks on civilians and civilian targets, torture and ill-treatment, and slavery/abduction, it said, in a memorandum to United Nations member states in general and members of the UN Commission on Human Rights, in particular.

The government of Sudan had long stonewalled on the issue of slavery, claiming it was a matter of rival tribes engaging in hostage taking, over which it had little control. That was "simply untrue, as myriad reports coming out of southern Sudan have made abundantly clear," Human Rights Watch stated.

"The government of Sudan must... investigate and cooperate completely with search and other agencies to locate and release, without payment, those who have been abducted and enslaved and held in slavery throughout the government-controlled areas of Sudan," it added.
[see http://www.hrw.org/africa/sudan.php]

Also on Friday, the organisation expressed concern about the detention of Hassan al Turabi, leader of the opposition Popular National Congress (PNC), who has been detained without trial for one year, and other members of the PNC.

Turabi was arrested in February 2001, on charges of undermining the constitution and waging war against the state, after he signed a memorandum of understanding with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A).

President Umar Hasan al-Bashir had gone on record as saying that Turabi would never be released unless he denounced the SPLA memo he had signed, HRW stated.

The Sudanese government had kept in force a state of emergency to suppress opposition to the ruling Islamist party but the most severe abuses occurred in the civil war theatres in the south, in the Nuba Mountains area of Southern Kordofan, south-central Sudan, and in the east, Human Rights Watch said in the statement on Friday, 15 March.

In southern oil fields, government militias and army forcibly displaced thousands of residents; continued to starve, abduct, rape and kill civilians; and continued to burn and bomb villages, churches, hospitals and schools, it said.

"Government use of new, heavier arms, including surface-to-surface missiles and helicopter gunships took a toll on the civilian population," it added.

Government army and militia forces continued to abduct women and children during ongoing raids in the south, mostly in northern Bahr al-Ghazal, "and often in connection with the military train they accompanied to Wau, a garrison town," Human Rights Watch reported on Friday.

The authorities in Khartoum announced in November 2001 their intention to set up a tribunal to try such abductors.

Rebel forces battling Khartoum had also "engaged in indiscriminate attacks on civilians", looting of civilian property, forced conscription and portering, abductions and rape, according to Human Rights Watch.

Though the SPLM/A had demobilised more than 3,000 child soldiers [last year], "many more remained in its forces and in the forces of the other rebel groups," it stated on Friday. HRW also referred to allegations that "many gang rapes by SPLA soldiers" were committed in western Upper Nile in February 2001.

In Friday's memorandum, Human Rights Watch urged all parties to the conflict in Sudan "to protect human rights and respect international humanitarian law in areas they control."

In particular, the belligerents should respect the rights of women and children, and ensure the safety of all civilians - including refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) - in their areas of control, it added.