SLA's Jebel Marra, the Switzerland of Sudan

In a guerrilla-held area lush with pastures, streams and groves, villagers go about self-sufficient lives very different from those of the displaced people huddled in dry, dusty camps below.

The rebels on the mountain
From Los Angeles Times
By Edmund Sanders
April 12, 2009
Reporting from Jebel Marra, Sudan —

To enter rebel-controlled territory at the base of this extinct Darfur volcano, you have to walk across a 100-yard no man's land that separates government soldiers from Sudan Liberation Army fighters. As we leave the United Nations trucks and cross a barren field toward our SLA hosts, rebel silhouettes sprout on the mountaintops standing guard. It feels oddly -- and a little amusingly -- like some sort of hostage exchange.

Getting here took nearly as much negotiation. There were awkward teas with local bureaucrats and a flurry of satellite phone calls with various insurgents before we finally procured the needed government stamps and rebel permissions. Roads to the mountain are so bandit-ridden that even the government advises against using them. Little wonder no journalist had visited in seven months.

It's agreed that U.N. peacekeepers can drop us at rebel lines but proceed no farther, because the SLA faction that controls Jebel Marra doesn't trust them any more than it does the government.

At the handoff, however, tensions quickly melt and soon rebels and troops are exchanging greetings and even posing for pictures.

The rebels are straight out of central casting. Most are teenage boys, their faces covered by sunglasses and head scarves. They'd look like schoolkids dressing up if the Kalashnikov rifles and bullet straps on their chests weren't real.

Every one of them is well-versed in the movement's dogma about the Darfur region's oppression at the hands of the Khartoum-based Sudanese government.

Asked why he joined, dreadlocked fighter Deng Khamis, 29, takes a drag on his cigarette, exhales with a dramatic sigh and says, "I was born marginalized."

From there it's a jerky, body-bruising ride up the rocky mountainside. As we climb, an unfamiliar world begins to materialize, like a mirage in the Darfur desert.

Most of western Sudan is flat, dry and almost bare of plant life. Here suddenly are pastures, streams, even forests. Past mango and orange groves lie dozens of small, quiet villages where people go about ordinary, self-sufficient lives in what some call the Switzerland of Sudan.

They live in scattered huts with plenty of land. They grow crops on terraced plots carved into the mountain. The World Food Program says the region hasn't needed regular aid distributions since 2006. The people here have rejected overcrowded displacement camps, dependence on foreign aid and the daily threat of banditry and government harassment in favor of a somewhat normal, if isolated and fragile, existence behind "enemy" lines.

It's a reminder of what Darfur must have been like before the 6-year-old insurgency engulfed it. "Up here things are OK," says Abdulkarim Hussein, 45, who was born in the village of Kutrum. "Once you leave the mountain, that's where the problems start."

It's not an easy life, he says, but it's better than the camps. "It's a trade-off," he said, pointing to bullet holes in his front door that were left in a 2007 skirmish. "But I choose this."

Fears of renewed violence have grown since the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant last month for Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who is accused of leading a brutal counterinsurgency.

"The past year was the first time in a long time that we didn't have to live every day with our shoelaces tied" to be ready to run, said Hawa Yagoub Abdalla, 35, a mother of three who lives in Kutrum. "We are worried about what will come next."

The government's recent expulsion of 13 international aid groups from Darfur, including Doctors Without Borders, is creating a healthcare crisis as well. Many clinics in Jebel Marra are seeing a steady increase in meningitis cases, though they ran out of vaccinations weeks ago and are short of antibiotics.

Rebels say they are helpless to fill the gap. "We are still a movement that is in the bush, so we don't have the resources," SLA commander Mergheani Ahmed said. Ahmed, 35, spent a decade working as an intelligence officer for the government. Seven years ago he defected, and he hasn't left the mountain since.

"My face is too known," he says. "I can never leave."

For a brief moment, we're not sure we can, either. After the third flat tire, the rebels' Land Cruiser is stranded and we're late for the U.N. pickup back at the mountain base. After 30 minutes of sprinting down the mountain, motorbikes are commandeered to complete the journey. We pass the villages, the mango groves and the buffer zone to arrive back at the flat, dusty and familiar reality of Darfur.

edmund.sanders@latimes.com

South Sudan gov't unable to pay civil servants and troops

A recent fragile peace is under threat. A slump in oil revenue, which accounts for most of his regional government’s budget, as well as corruption in Juba, has left Southern Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir, who is Sudan’s national vice-president too, is unable to pay his civil servants and troops.



Southern Sudan - Fear of fragmentation
April 08, 2009 (NAIROBI)
From The Economist print edition

HUNDREDS of women and children were killed last month in Southern Sudan’s province of Jonglei, either shot or run through with spears. Some locals put the toll at more than 700. Officials in Juba, the capital of the largely autonomous region of Southern Sudan, say the figure was lower. In any event, a fresh spate of killing now threatens the broad peace that the region has been enjoying—and could even upset the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in 2005 between Sudan’s mainly Arab government in Khartoum and rebels in the black African south who had waged a war of independence for most of the previous three decades.

At first it seemed the killings were the result of routine cattle raids by Nuer warriors on the Murle, whom the Nuer accused of rustling thousands of cattle. Such raids usually end in a handful of deaths on either side. But the scale of the Jonglei killings, with the Nuer apparently riddling civilians with gunfire from weapons they were meant to have given up, has cast a pall of gloom over the south. It has not been lightened by the failure of the local Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) to intervene. There have been killings elsewhere in the south too. Some fear the north-south accord is near to collapse.

Southern Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir, who is Sudan’s national vice-president too, has every reason to play down the Jonglei killings. A slump in oil revenue, which accounts for most of his regional government’s budget, as well as corruption in Juba, has left him unable to pay his civil servants and troops. This has led to riots by disabled SPLA veterans and mutinies by soldiers. The border with Uganda, which handles nearly all of Southern Sudan’s trade, has been closed by veterans who said they had not been paid for seven months. Mr Kiir had to intervene with cash and grain to end the mutiny. Ugandan lorry drivers stranded on the Sudanese side of the border claimed that the SPLA harassed them.

Since 90% of Southern Sudan’s people live on less than $1 a day, tightening belts is not an option. They are as hungry, poorly educated and diseased as the ill-starred people of Darfur. Tribal leaders in the south say competition for water and grazing is adding to the tension between the tribes. Groups such as the Murle will return deaths in kind. The UN says 187,000 Southern Sudanese were displaced by tribal fighting last year. This year the number may double. As the Jonglei slaughter shows, plans to disarm have not been fulfilled. The worry is that the SPLA, a ruthless lot hardened by years of war, will end up taking sides, further unsettling the south and threatening the peace agreement.

Mr Kiir wants to stamp out “tribal spoilers” before national elections next year. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, who was recently indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague for alleged crimes in Darfur, is nervous about the possibility of Mr Kiir running as a candidate for the national presidency, appealing to voters even in the Arab bits of the country. Mr Kiir has so far been careful not to voice an opinion on the ICC warrant but may try to use it to squeeze concessions from the north—on oil and the Nile waters, among other things—before a referendum in 2011, when the Southern Sudanese will be asked if they want to secede from Sudan to form an independent country, probably to be called New Sudan.

This may put Barack Obama’s administration on the spot. American lobbies have concentrated on Darfur, largely to the exclusion of Southern Sudan. A policy review headed by Samantha Power, one of Mr Obama’s foreign-policy advisers, may be hard on Mr Kiir even as it endorses the ICC’s effort to bring Mr Bashir to justice.

The review may also suggest ways of dealing with the Lord’s Resistance Army, a murderous Ugandan militia that was recently hammered—but not defeated—by a joint offensive of Ugandan, Congolese and Southern Sudanese troops, underwritten by the outgoing Bush administration. Many in Juba are terrified that the Lord’s Resistance Army may now kill and rape its way through Southern Sudan, perhaps with weapons and training provided by the national government in Khartoum, which remains loth to see the south of the country peeling peacefully away.

US envoy Gration has "constructive" talks with Sudanese FM

US envoy to Sudan Scott Gration said on Wednesday that he found the situation in some areas in Darfur much better than what he had expected in particular with regard to the food, while the situation in some other areas was worse especially in the areas of water and health care.

Source: Xinhua (Khartoum) Thursday, 09 April 2009 - excerpt:
U.S. envoy has "constructive" talks with Sudanese FM

The special envoy of the U.S. president to Sudan Scott Gration said on Wednesday that he held "constructive" talks with Sudanese Foreign Minister Deng Alor on the situations in the western Sudanese region of Darfur and southern Sudan.

The U.S. envoy told reporters at the end of the meeting that he briefed the Sudanese foreign minister on the results of his visits to Darfur and Juba, the capital of southern Sudan, as well as Abyei, a disputed area between northern and southern Sudan.

He said that he found the situation in some areas in Darfur much better than what he had expected in particular with regard to the food, while the situation in some other areas was worse especially in the areas of water and health care.

He added that a coordination between all parties concerned was necessary to improve the situation of displaced persons in Darfur and improve their poor nutrition condition.

Gration noted that the priorities for the next phase would focus on addressing the emergency situation in Darfur in the humanitarian and security fields and reach a ceasefire between the conflicting parties.

The Sudanese foreign minister, on his part, expressed his confidence that the visit of the U.S. envoy to Sudan would help the new U.S. administration to deal with Sudan in the coming period. Editor: Deng Shasha

Photo: Traditional healer Abu Bakr Mohammed prepares a prescription at his straw hut near Abu Shouk refugee camp in el Fasher, Sudan Friday, March 27, 2009. With her health options limited, one woman in this Darfur refugee camp is considering a risky alternative: a traditional healer who promises his potion of holy water, charcoal and glue, touched by verses of the Quran, can cure her uterus inflammation. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)

UNAMID peacekeeping chief meets with Minni Minawi

Photo: Supporters ride on horses and camels as they welcome Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir (not in the picture) before a rally at Zalinge town, west Darfur, April 7, 2009. Sudan's embattled president told a rally on Tuesday that his own officials would track down war criminals in Darfur, dismissing Western attempts to bring justice to the region. Picture taken April 7, 2009. (Reuters/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallh)

From UNAMID - Wednesday, 08 April 2009:
UNAMID Joint Special Representative meets with Mr. Minni Minawi

UNAMID Joint Special Representative, Mr. Rodolphe Adada, today met with the Special Assistant to the President and the Chairman of the Transitional Darfur Regional Authority (TDRA), Mr. Minni Minawi.

They discussed a series of issues, including the enhancement of security and the humanitarian situation in Darfur. Mr. Minawi requested more frequent contacts between UNAMID and the TDRA. Mr. Adada and Mr. Minawi also discussed development issues and how UNAMID can support the people of Darfur through more Quick Impact Projects (QIPs).

Mr. Adada stressed the importance of keeping close contact with the TDRA and reiterated UNAMID’s support for the effective implementation of the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) and other subsequent Agreements, in line with its mandate. In this context, it was agreed that a liaison mechanism between TDRA and UNAMID should be further strengthened.

The meeting was also attended by the Deputy Joint Special Representative (DJSR) for Operations and Management, Mr. Hocine Medili.

Photo: Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, center, addresses supporters during his visit to the western Darfur town of Zalengi, Sudan, Tuesday, April 7, 2009. Sudan's embattled president on a visit to Darfur Tuesday called on the people of the region to bring armed groups battling the government around to peace talks. (AP Photo/Abd Raouf)

Darfur, Sudan: ICC's deputy prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, urged nations to "deny Omar al-Bashir any form of support"

Photo: The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, left, speaks at a press conference as Deputy Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, right, looks on, at the seat of the Court in The Hague, Netherlands, Monday, July 14, 2008. Moreno-Ocampo has filed genocide charges against Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir. The charges include masterminding attempts to wipe out African tribes in Darfur with a campaign of murder, rape and deportation. (AP Photo/Fred Ernst)

Court prosecutor: isolate Sudan's president
By MIKE CORDER Associated Press Writer April 07, 2009
via Contra Costa Times:

THE HAGUE, Netherlands—The International Criminal Court's deputy prosecutor urged world leaders on Tuesday to cut ties with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the court for alleged war crimes in Darfur.

The U.N.-backed tribunal issued an arrest warrant for al-Bashir last month on charges including genocide for allegedly orchestrating efforts to wipe out three African tribes in his oil-rich country's Darfur region.

Since then, al-Bashir has made a series of trips to neighboring African countries and an Arab League summit in Qatar. He also expelled 13 major relief organizations from Darfur—a move denounced around the world.

The international court has no police force and relies on other countries to execute arrest warrants.

The 22-member Arab League said, however, it decided not to enforce the warrant when al-Bashir attended the Qatar summit March 30, as many Arab and African countries have said pursuing al-Bashir could further destabilize the region.

The court's deputy prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, urged nations to "deny Omar al-Bashir any form of support."

"States should implement a consistent diplomatic campaign to support the court's decision," she told diplomats in The Hague. "Nonessential contacts with Omar al-Bashir should be severed."

Fighting in Darfur since 2003 has left up to 300,000 people dead and driven another 2.7 million from their homes, the United Nations says.

It says al-Bashir's expulsion of the 13 humanitarian agencies has deprived more than 3 million people of crucial food aid, health care or drinking water.

"The expulsion of aid workers is another step in the commission of the crime of extermination," Bensouda said.

Photo: Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, on top of a vehicle, cente, drives past supporters as he arrives back home after attending the Arab summit in Doha, in Khartoum, Sudan, Wednesday, April 1, 2009. Thousands of chanting, singing people greeted the Sudanese president, who's wanted for war crimes, as he returned Wednesday from his trip to the Arab League Summit. (AP Photo/Abd Raouf)

Sudanese president urges Darfur rebel groups to join peace talks
From China View April 07, 2009:

ZALINGEI, West Darfur, Sudan, April 7 (Xinhua) – Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir urged on Tuesday rebel groups in western Sudanese region of Darfur to join the negotiation in order to reach a peaceful settlement to the conflict in the region.

Addressing a rally of local residents in Zalingei town in West Darfur state, al-Bashir said that peace and security were the key for development and reconstruction in the region, adding that the government could not implement projects of development and reconstruction in areas affected by war without security and consensus for a peaceful solution.

Al-Bashir reiterated his government's commitment to development in Darfur and payment of individual and collective compensation for those affected by the war and returning of displaced persons to their homelands.

After arriving in the town of Zalingei in West Darfur in the morning, the Sudanese president inaugurated a number of projects of development and basic services, primarily hospitals and health centers.

Al-Bashir's visit to the Darfur region came in the framework of the Sudanese government's efforts to persuade political parties in the region the need for consensus on a political solution to end the conflict which has lasted for more than five years.

This was the third visit for al-Bashir in Darfur since the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued on March 4 an arrest warrant against him over charges of war crimes and crimes of anti-humanity.

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Sudan president: Peace in hands of Darfur people
From Associated Press April 08, 2009 - excerpt:

Sudan's embattled president on a visit to Darfur Tuesday called on the people of the region to bring armed groups battling the government around to peace talks.

It was the third visit by Omar al-Bashir to Darfur since the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him March 4 for allegedly orchestrating atrocities against Darfur's ethnic African tribes. His comments came in the western Darfur town of Zaleingi, home to a prominent rebel leader and the closest al-Bashir has ever been to rebel-held areas.

"You are the people suffering, and you are the people who want peace, and you will be the ones to bring peace," he told the crowd of thousands at the organized rally.

On Tuesday, al-Bashir appeared less confrontational than in recent speeches. Although still critical of the expelled aid groups, the president welcomed those offering humanitarian help so long as they didn't violate Sudan's sovereignty.

He blamed rebel groups for sabotaging peace overtures, and undermining security and development in the region, and called on Darfurians to bring them around.

"What is asked of you is to bring peace. No one here doesn't have contact (with the rebels). No one in the bush doesn't have relatives in the town...These are our sons. What you care about they care about, and what they care about, you care about," he said.

Zaleingi native, Abdelwahid Nur, a rebel leader who now lives in exile, has repeatedly refused to join peace talks, saying the government must first bring security to Darfur, and disarm government-allied militias.

Rebuffing international efforts to hold people accountable for the Darfur conflict, al-Bashir said it should be up to the people of Darfur to bring justice to the region. He said local tribal committees are working to determine the victims and culprits, and that the government will pay compensation.

Commentator Al-Tayeb Zein al-Abdeen, a professor in Khartoum University, said after showing defiance, al-Bashir is now looking for a way out of the ICC impasse.

"He has finished his first round. Nothing is left now...and the tone is reconciliatory," Zein al-Abdeen said.

The Sudanese president also said an African Union-appointed panel, headed by former South African president Thabo Mbeki, will visit Darfur soon to assess the conflict and find ways to achieve reconciliation and justice. Mbeki said a report will be ready in July.

Sudan's Minister of Health says the health situation in IDP camps in Darfur is stable

Just in from Sudan Radio Service:

07 April 2009 - (Khartoum) - The Minister of Health in the Government of National Unity says the health situation in IDP camps in Darfur is stable.

Doctor Tabitha Boutros was speaking at a press conference in Khartoum during World Health day on Sunday.

She said her ministry has "stabilized" the health situation in the IDP camps in Darfur which deteriorated after the expulsion of the international non-governmental organizations last month.

[Tabitha Boutros]: “What happened after the NGOs left was that the Ministries of Health and Humanitarian Affairs made an assessment of the situation in the camps and we found there were gaps of medical drugs but the Ministry of Health and the medical services have closed the gaps and so the situation is good now.”

She added that her ministry plans to upgrade existing hospitals and establish others in different regions in the country to cater for the growing population.

[Tabitha Boutros]: “With all sincerity, in the past, hospitals were built without any objectives, especially the private hospitals. Someone has a house and just converts it into a health center, or someone has a building and makes it into a private hospital. We do not like it this way. We have put in place policies and descriptions of a hospital and other health units according to the population in those specific areas. For example, 50,000 people will be served by a health center with hospital equipment and a laboratory service will be available. And now we are working on the hospitals to see how we can preserve the equipment and their service.”

Dr. Tabitha said the government intends to involve all stakeholders at all levels of government to ensure that the strategic plan to deliver health services to the people succeeds.

Photo: Kalma camp, Darfur, W. Sudan (Voitek Asztabski/AP)

Sudanese president promises justice and compensation

Sudan's president told a rally on Tuesday that his own officials would track down war criminals in Darfur, dismissing Western attempts to bring justice to the region. "After the reconciliation we will investigate those who are criminals and those who committed crimes and those who were killed and those who were killers. This is all guaranteed. Compensation will be paid. Everyone will get their right. This is justice" he said.

Source: Tue Apr 7, 2009 Reuters report by Ibrahim Hamdi - excerpts:
Sudan's Bashir vows to try Darfur war criminals

ZALINGEI, Sudan, April 7 (Reuters) - Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir -- who is himself wanted on charges of masterminding atrocities in Darfur -- addressed a crowd of thousands in Zalingei, one of the most politically charged towns in Darfur.

"We know about justice between us and we know how to solve our problems. We have a committee for tribal reconciliation," Bashir told the crowd.

"After the reconciliation we will investigate those who are criminals and those who committed crimes and those who were killed and those who were killers. This is all guaranteed. Compensation will be paid. Everyone will get their right. This is justice."

Zalingei is the birthplace of some of Darfur's best-known rebels, including Sudan Liberation Army founder Abdel Wahed Mohamed Ahmed al-Nur, and is a hotbed of anti-government sentiment.

But there was no obvious sign of opposition at the rally where Bashir arrived on the back of an open truck, as streams of white-robed Darfuris rode past him on horses and camels.

On the edges on the crowd, people climbed trees and stood on the raised scoop of an industrial digger to get a better view.

Bashir praised Arab and African efforts to bring peace to Darfur, including the recent visit of the African Union's own panel on Darfur, headed by former South African president Thabo Mbeki.

"We thank the AU and the former presidents headed by Mbeki who came here ... But we don't want those Khawajas (foreigners)," he told the crowd.

"Judgement, it's not here. It's not with Ocampo or others. Our judgement is before God," the president said. Luis Moreno-Ocampo is the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court who is leading its war crimes case against Bashir.

Sudan appointed its own special prosecutor to look into reports of war crimes in Darfur in August, but the move has so far not produced any new prosecutions.

(Additional reporting by Khaled Abdelaziz in Khartoum, Writing by Andrew Heavens; Editing by Giles Elgood)

AU/UN officials report humanitarian progress in Darfur

April 06, 2009 Voice of America News report by Peter Heinlein:
AU/UN Officials Report Humanitarian Progress in Darfur

Addis Ababa - A senior official of the hybrid African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur says progress is being made in filling the gap left by Sudan's expulsion of 13 humanitarian aid agencies. The war crimes indictments handed down against Sudan's President, Omar al-Bashir, have not led to a deterioration of security in Darfur.

Rodolphe Adada, the joint A.U./U.N. Special Representative for Darfur says Sudan's decision to expel more than 10 percent of the aid agencies in Darfur has complicated the work of the hybrid peacekeeping force known as UNAMID. "It is like a threat. You cannot be doing just your normal business in front of many hungry and angry people," he said.

Adada says hungry Darfurians do not want to hear that UNAMID's mandate is strictly peacekeeping and not aid distribution.

After briefing the African Union Peace and Security Council on Monday, Adada acknowledged that the recent influx of displaced persons at the Zam Zam camp in northern Darfur has strained humanitarian operations. But he says a feared deterioration of security conditions has not occurred.

"We think there have been no major consequences in the security in Darfur. And it is more than one month later -- the situation is fine now. The problem in Zam Zam was a little bit different. But we are trying to help the best we can. This humanitarian thing is a concern because we are on the ground. And if we have to pass through a disaster, it will impact immediately on UNAMID," he said.

Also speaking to the Council was Sudan's A.U. Ambassador, Mohiedin Salim, who described the 13 expelled aid groups as spies and charged that the expulsion had created what he called a "false media outcry".

Salim acknowledged a gap in humanitarian services since the expulsions, leaving thousands of people displaced by the fighting in Darfur without food and medical care.

But he said the more than 100 agencies remaining in the region could quickly make up most of the aid shortfall. "The NGOs [i.e., non-governmental organizations] are already there. We have 105 foreign NGOs; we have now 14 American NGOs. We have now 12 British NGOs. They are right now on the ground working. Forty-five percent of the work in Darfur now is exercised by the Red Crescent of Sudan," he said.

The United States says diplomats recently visiting Zam Zam camp found worsening conditions, including water shortages.

Aid agencies say more than six years of civil war in Darfur has forced 2.7 million people to flee their homes. Officials estimate that at least 200,000 people died in the first two years of the conflict.

But UNAMID figures show conflict-related death tolls have dropped sharply during the past few years, averaging about 1,500 people a year since early 2005.

US Senator John Kerry to visit Darfur and Khartoum, Sudan

Senator to make rare Darfur visit
April 06, 2009 Reuters report by Andrew Heavens - excerpt:

Khartoum - The chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, will lead a delegation to Sudan's Darfur region, U.S. officials said on Monday, in a possible sign of a growing willingness to engage with Khartoum.

"This is significant," a U.S. diplomatic source told Reuters. "It is the first Congressional delegation to Sudan we have had since 2007. Like the U.S. envoy's current visit, it is a new tack."

The U.S. diplomatic source said Kerry, a Democrat, would lead a Congressional delegation to Darfur, and would meet senior Sudanese officials in Khartoum in the middle of next week.

The state-run Sudanese Media Center said the U.S. Congressional delegation would visit Sudan for three days next week. (Editing by Giles Elgood)

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Photo: US Democratic Senator John Kerry, seen here in March 2009, participates in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will visit Darfur next week, a US official said on Monday, amid signs of thawing US-Sudan relations. (AFP/Getty Images/File/Mark Wilson)

Kerry to highlight peace deal
April 06, 2009 AFP (SA) report - excerpt:

Washington - Democratic US Senator John Kerry will discuss US-Sudan relations and snarled efforts to implement a 2005 north-south peace deal when he visits the country next week, an aide said on Monday.

But the top lawmaker will not meet with President Omar al-Bashir, who is under an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the six-year conflict in Darfur, the aide told AFP.

Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "will discuss US-Sudan relations and the implementation of the comprehensive peace agreement" reached in 2005, the aide said.

"John Kerry will arrive in the middle of next week, he will visit Darfur and meet with officials in the country. His visit will last a few days," said that official, who asked not to be named.

Implementation of the 2005 agreement, which ended Sudan's two-decade north-south civil conflict, has hit many snags, but some leaders in the region have suggested that the ICC warrant should be deferred if Bashir implements existing peace accords. [...]

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Photo: Flowers in El-Fashir, northern Darfur, Sudan (Andrew Heavens)

Note to self for future reference.

PoliticsOnline: The Second Superpower campaigns for Kerry
For the first time in history, the rise of global citizen activism through the Internet is impacting the U.S. presidential elections.
- Jim Moore - October 16, 2004.

Prendergast's Enough Project discussing U.S. relations with Sudan: Kerry himself mentioned previous American leadership failures in relation to Sudan policy as well as his and Secretary Clinton’s interests in the no-fly zone and American engagement with Africa generally. He told the assembled group that this is, “a moment for serious people to buckle down and find serious responses,” to Sudan’s crises. Senator Kerry ended the hearing by asking each expert to pull together a summary of what they think the key U.S. policy priorities should be for Sudan.
- Sudan Watch - February 14, 2009.



Cartoon by Mike Luckovich circa Apr 2006

New book by Mahmood Mamdani: 'Save Darfur' movement is not a peace movement

Copied here below are two reviews of a new book entitled Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror (Pantheon) by Mahmood Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University. I am copying the reviews in full because they contain points of view on the 'Save Darfur' movement.



Photo: Mahmood Mamdani was previously the dean of the faculty of social sciences at Makerere University and the founding director of the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, Uganda. He has also taught at the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Cape Town in South Africa. His previous books include "Citizen and Subject," "When Victims Become Killers," "Scholars in the Marketplace" and "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim." He lives in New York City and Kampala. (sdsuniverse.info)

From The National April 03, 2009
The devil is in the details
By Wesley Yang

Mahmood Mamdani’s stemwinding book on Darfur brilliantly punctures the sanctities of the international humanitarian order – but doesn’t know where to stop,Wesley Yang writes.



Photo: A soldier in the Sudanese Liberation Army, which rebelled against the Sudanese government in Darfur, holds a bullet as he loads an aging Kalashnikov. (Benjamin Lowy/Corbis)

The international community is presently engaged in a high-stakes game of poker with the government of Sudan. At stake is the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court, the permanent sitting tribunal whose purpose is to punish those that commit the worst crimes against humanity. Also hanging in the balance are the lives of 2.5 million Darfurian refugees who have been driven from their homes by a scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign launched by the Sudanese government in response to rebel attacks in the region in 2003.

Both sides in this international stand-off have already demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice those lives for the sake of the principles they support. The Sudanese government has thrown out 13 international aid groups who provide the food and medicine necessary to sustain those refugees, under the pretext that they gathered evidence for the ICC against Sudan’s president, Omar al Bashir. The ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo went ahead with the indictment in full knowledge that this was the likely consequence. He claims to be acting in the interest of justice alone, without reference to the political or humanitarian situation – and no one disputes that by arming and abetting mounted Arab proxies (later dubbed “devils on horseback” in the press) to put down a rebellion with indiscriminate violence against civilians, al Bashir violated the spirit and letter of international law (as have many rulers before him). We have a struggle for primacy between the two principles – national sovereignty and international law – that seems likely to define global politics for the rest of this century.

Providing an accurate account of these principles, and the intricate politics in which they are embedded, involves wading through self-serving and overwrought claims from both sides while weighing two genuine and incommensurable claims to legitimacy. In his new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, the distinguished Africa scholar Mahmood Mamdani does his readers the considerable service of laying waste to many of the dangerous and self-serving illusions of one side of this argument. But he erects a mirror edifice of illusions in its place; getting the story straight requires disentangling the true from the misleading in Mamdani’s account.

On one side, there are the claims of universal justice that the ICC purports to represent. The ICC is the institutional face of a growing movement seeking to make real the promise of “Never Again” inscribed into the Convention on Genocide of 1948. The ICC indictment of al Bashir was the first against a sitting head of state, and it was hailed in editorial pages across America as a great progressive advance for global justice. Even those who worried about the consequences of the indictment still placed hope in its deterrent value. The goal was to worry the minds of subsequent heads of state tempted to use mass rape and murder as a counter-insurgency tactic.

Taken on its own terms, in narrow isolation, this is a worthy and unassailable mission. But nothing exists in narrow isolation, least of all moral purity and universal justice. Such claims exist in a real world of actual politics amid complicated histories, which many Darfur activists have made it their business to elide – portraying the conflict in Darfur as what Mamdani dubs “a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart”.

On the other side are the rights of sovereign governments to govern themselves without outside interference, which the Sudanese government and the Arab nations that have rallied to its side purport to defend. Sovereignty has been, since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the currency of the international system, and, as Mamdani reminds us, a privilege hard-won by postcolonial states only recently.

In the wake of the American misadventure in Iraq, the weird confluence of moralistic rhetoric and bellicose policy that characterised Bush’s foreign policy, the complicity of so many ostensibly liberal hawks caught up in the Iraq War fervour, and a history of one-sided enforcement of humanitarian rules, it should surprise no one that the leaders and intellectuals of formerly colonised states are wary of the claims to universal justice emanating from what Mamdani dubs the “new humanitarian order”. At this week’s Arab Summit in Doha, Arab leaders, many of them signatories to the ICC, (which the United States has refused to sign) lined up in unanimous support of al Bashir.

The human rights lobby views this emphasis on sovereignty as the first and last resort of butchers who employ anti-colonialist rhetoric to defend their crimes. Weary of the grubby compromises of diplomats and corporations willing to do business with tyrants and criminals, one faction of the human rights community calls for armed western intervention to defend helpless victims of state violence everywhere. The Save Darfur movement, an aggressive and media-savvy coalition “whose scale recalls the anti-war movement of the late 1960s and 1970s”, rose up with the intention to turn Darfur into a test case for western action to halt what it called a genocide in progress.

Mamdani devotes the first section of his book to assailing the credibility of Save Darfur. He accuses them of inflating the scale of the killing, obfuscating the reality of a “civil war” and “cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency” that it called genocide, bombarding viewers and readers with “a pornography of violence” that removed the conflict from its political context, sustaining an impression of ongoing genocide long after the claim was plausible, portraying the conflict in racialised terms as a genocide conducted by Arabs against Africans and ceaselessly advocating for hard-line policies more likely to harm than to the help the victims they intended to save. On each of these counts, Mamdani assembles a more or less devastating case. Save Darfur publicised a figure for the number of deaths – 400,000 – that was twice as high as reliable estimates (Mamdani cites a study commissioned by the US Government Accountablity Office to this effect) and escalated its rhetoric at precisely the moment – January 2005 – when the scale of killing fell dramatically. Save Darfur have continued to clamour for aggressive action despite a humanitarian crisis that was largely stabilised due to the cooperation of the Sudanese government with aid agencies that had reduced the mortality rate to between 100 and 200 month in Darfur – “below emergency levels”, according to World Health Organisation.

Most important for Mamdani’s purpose, though, is the Save Darfur Coalition’s emphasis on the race of the perpetrators and victims: “The central claim is that perpetrators and victims in Darfur belong to two different racial groups, Arab and African and that the Arab perpetrator is evil.” Mamdani is not content to say, as he does, that Save Darfur are committed to policies that will do harm. He intends to demonstrate that they are part of a more insidious agenda written into the War on Terror. To strip Darfur of its politics serves a political project of its own, and Mamdani makes it his mission to reveal its workings – what he sees as the foundation of a post-Cold War order in which American clients and proxies act with impunity while rogue states are subject to violent discipline at the hands of the international community, with America at its head. It is a politics notable for denying that it is a politics at all and, as Mamdani narrates it, one that portends a bleak future for the inhabitants of the developing world.

In the long historical section that makes up the centre of the book, Mamdani traces the centuries-long intermingling of Arab and African identities in Darfur, and their reciprocal permeability. He also shows how these identities were politicised under the “indirect” rule practised by British colonial administrators that pursued a policy of “re-tribalisation” of the various groups that shared Darfur by assigning homelands to certain groups and denying them to others.

This backdrop allows Mamdani, in his third and final section, to return to the question with which the book opens. Since Americans are inclined to regard Africa, to the extent that they regard it at all, as a site of “meaningless anarchy – in which men, sometimes women, and increasingly, children, fight without aim or memory,” why has there been “a global publicity boom around the carnage in Darfur”?

The worst conflict since the Second World War, with a death toll of 3.9 million between 1998 and 2004, raged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the figure of “excess deaths” caused by the Iraq war likely outstrip the same numbers in Darfur. Yet only Darfur, a conflict in a remote and impoverished region without oil or other significant exportable resources has generated a lavishly funded advocacy organisation. For Mamdani, the answer is embedded in the definition of genocide itself. “Only when extreme violence targets for annihilation a civilian population that is marked off as different ‘on grounds of race, ethnicity, or religion’ is that violence termed genocide,” Mamdani observes:

“Given that colonialism shaped the very nature of modern ‘indirect rule’ and administrative power along ‘tribal’ (or ethnic) lines it is not surprising that both the exercise of power and responses to it tend to take ‘tribal’ forms in these newly independent states. From this point of view, there is little to distinguish mass violence unleashed against civilians in Congo, Northern Uganda, Mozambique, Angola, Darfur, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and so on. Which one is named ‘genocide’ and which one is not? Most important, who decides?”

The new humanitarian order is, as Mamdani describes it, “a bifurcated system whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East,” in which subjects exchange their political rights as citizens of sovereign states for the “human” rights possessed by “wards in an open-ended international rescue operation” in a humanitarian “system of trusteeship” administered by an international community that lacks either accountability or responsibility. The world he describes he looks a lot like the world as the Palestinians under the jurisdiction of UNRWA see it, and the vision Mamdani projects of an Africa delivered piecemeal to the good intentions of the international community is a stark one.

A problem with this claim, however, is that the record of American policy in Sudan challenges it. Indeed, proponents of humanitarian intervention in Darfur make a diametrically opposite charge against the American government – that it has subordinated its interest in the cause of human rights to its desire to maintain relations with Sudanese intelligence to aid the War on Terror. Mamdani’s argument also passes over the American response to Sudan’s much longer, more brutal and more complex civil war, a two-decade conflict pitting Christians and animists from the south of the country against the Arab Islamist cabal to the north that controlled the state and the military.

It was here that al Bashir pioneered the technique of using proxy war conducted by mounted Arab warriors. And it was this conflict that first aroused activist concern among the evangelical Christian movement at the base of George W Bush’s electoral coalition.

Islamists in Sudan were waging a brutal war against the Christian coreligionists of the single most belligerent electoral constituency in American politics. If the goal of American policy was, as Mamdani alleges, to “slice Africa by demonising one group of Africans, African Arabs”, then surely the Sudanese Civil War was the perfect opportunity to carry out this agenda. But the Bush administration instead expended considerable diplomatic resources cajoling the North and the South to make peace in a negotiated settlement that Mamdani himself acknowledges as Bush’s only foreign policy accomplishment.

While there were plenty of hardline advocates for the fantasy of regime change in Sudan, the United States remained effectively committed to the stability of the Bashir regime, as the only guarantor of the peace deal it had signed, through the end of the Bush Administration.

And so, when Mamdani describes the “the responsibility to protect” as “a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonise Africa”, he is mistaking the fantasies of American activists for the policies of their government. He is also asserting the existence of a hidden nefarious agenda where none exists, and providing a false clarity that is the merely the obverse of the good-and-evil dichotomy of the War on Terror and the humanitarian order that he assails.

This overreaching damages the credibility of Mamdani’s powerful and incisive criticism of the international justice movement. So much of what Mamdani argues is true, and so much of it cuts against the grain of the usual coverage of Darfur in ways that are essential for the broader public to understand. And neither he, nor the rest of us, can afford to squander the opportunity to set the record straight.

Wesley Yang is a frequent contributor to The Review.

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From Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss (www.philipweiss.org)
April 06, 2009
Mamdani: 'Save Darfur' movement is not a peace movement

James North writes:

I remember Mahmood Mamdani from 35 years ago, when he was the most dynamic leader of the newly-organized union of graduate students at Harvard. Today he is a distinguished professor at Columbia, one of our most original analysts of Africa, most recently of Darfur. He is himself an African (from Uganda) of South Asian descent, and his decades of teaching and doing research all over his home continent command our interest.

His most recent work, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (Pantheon), is really several books in one. A large middle section covers the ethnic/tribal/political history of Darfur itself in enormous detail, and will be useful mainly to Africa specialists. But his opening segment, a brilliant dissection of the Save Darfur movement, should be read by everyone who thinks they understand what is really going on today in that area of Sudan. His conclusion is similarly indispensable, in which he raises doubts that the Western passion to pursue "justice" in places like Darfur can also promote peace.

First, the facts.

Two rebel movements in Darfur rose against the Khartoum regime in 2003, which responded over the next 2 years with murder and repression. Starting in 2005, all the experts agree, death rates there dropped dramatically. But, Mamdami notes, "The rhetoric of the Save Darfur movement in the United States escalated as the level of mortality in Darfur declined." He carefully documents that prominent people in the Darfur solidarity movement, such as the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, are chronically vague about how many died and when.

Since then, the two Darfur rebel movements have splintered into 20 factions, some of which are fighting each other, and the civil war element which was present from the start has only gotten worse. But the Darfur solidarity movement continues to see the conflict in one dimension, as "Arabs" committing "genocide" against "black Africans."

Mamdani says:

"It was a feat of imagination that required, at the least, a combination of two things: on the one hand, a worthy conviction that even the most wretched and the most distant of humans be considered a part of one’s moral universe but, on the other, a questionable political sense that the lack of precise knowledge of a far-distant place need not be reason enough to keep one from taking urgent action."

What’s more, Mamdami contends, and here the expert opinion is all on his side, that the solidarity movement’s proposals – the most prominent is to send foreign troops – will make a bad situation worse. He says pointedly:

"One needs to bear in mind that the movement to Save Darfur – like the War on Terror – is not a peace movement: it calls for a military intervention rather than political reconciliation, punishment rather than peace."

Mamdani then makes a daring and original effort to interpret the origins of the Darfur solidarity movement. He points out that Darfur protests were far bigger than demonstrations against the simultaneous U.S. war in Iraq, in which far more people were then dying. He is not entirely sure why. First he comes close to suggesting that the Save Darfur movement was a deliberate or at least a convenient way to depoliticize opposition to Iraq, especially among students. But then he suggests that Darfur may be a roundabout way for Americans to avoid Iraq:

". . . Iraq makes some Americans feel responsible and guilty. . . Darfur, in contrast, is an act not of responsibility but of philanthropy. Unlike Iraq, Darfur is a place for which Americans do not need to feel responsible but choose to take responsibility."

Whatever the explanation, Mamdani emphasizes that Save Darfur’s moral outrage interferes with a peaceful settlement. He spends more than half the book outlining the tangled ethnic, tribal, historical, regional and environmental history of the region. The reader’s head is swimming in names, but Mamdani’s central point has registered: Darfur today is extraordinarily complex, not reducible to simply "Arabs" vs. "Africans."

Toward the end of the book, Mamdani raises questions about the International Criminal Court (ICC), which last year indicted Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for "genocide." He points out, reluctantly but realistically, that the demands of "justice" may conflict with "peace." If Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress had in the early 1990s insisted on prosecuting the responsible officials in the apartheid regime from top to bottom there would have been no peaceful settlement. Similar painful compromises and overlooking of past crimes were necessary in Mozambique and elsewhere.

He does recognize a "kernel of truth" in the International Criminal Court’s indictment, with respect to "the period of 2003-4, when Darfur was the site of mass deaths." He says, "There is no doubt that the perpetrators of this violence should be held accountable, but when and how is a political decision that cannot belong to the ICC prosecutor."

Maybe Mahmood Mamdani’s own African origins help protect him against simple-minded moralizing. He is familiar at first-hand with human rights violations; his own family was expelled from Uganda in the early 1970s by the infamous (and at first Western-backed) dictator, Idi Amin. But for him Africa is his original home, not a distant fantasyland in which to work out his psychic conflicts. He has earned our respect and considered attention.

Comments

its taken far too long for people to challenge groups like save darfur, which oppose peace in sudan.
Posted by: mohanad, April 06, 2009

Darfur, like Bosnia and Kosovo, became a neocon cause, partly, I think, to show that the U.S. would intervene to protect Muslim victims of ethnic cleansing, to defang the "clash of civilizations" dragon.
Posted by: Grumpy Old Man, April 06, 2009

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Cryptic note to self, thinking about the real story and Jim.

AU Peace and Security Council briefing attended by AU-UN Joint Chief Mediator, Djibril Bassolé

Latest developments in Darfur focus of UN-African Union meeting
April 06, 2009 report from UN News Centre - excerpt:

Officials from the hybrid United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) were in Addis Ababa today, where they briefed the AU Peace and Security Council on the latest security and humanitarian situation in the war-torn western region of the Sudan.

The AU-UN Joint Special Representative Rodolphe Adada briefed the Council on the impact of the arrest warrant issued at the beginning of last month by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir. [...]

Mr. Adada also briefed the Council on the current military strength of UNAMID, which stands at more than 12,000 of the 19,555 force authorized by the Security Council over one year ago. [...]

The AU-UN Joint Chief Mediator, Djibril Bassolé, also attended the briefing to discuss the arrest warrant with the AU Council as well as the recent peace initiative resulting from the Summit of the League of Arab States in Doha and its consequences for his mediation efforts.

Participants from the Government of Sudan and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) took part in today’s meeting in the Ethiopian capital, which is also the headquarters of the AU. Deputy Joint Special Representative Hocine Medili, Deputy Joint Chief Mediator Azouz Ennifar and the Director of the Communications and Information Division of UNAMID, Kemal Saïki, also participated.

Yemeni President Saleh confirms solidarity with Sudan

Sudanese Director General of the National Security and Intelligence Service Gen. Salah Abdellah Gosh has visited Yemen to deliver a letter from Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

From Yemen News Agency (SABA) 06 April 2009:
President Saleh receives letter form Sudanese counterpart

SANA'A, April 06 (Saba) - President Ali Abdullah Saleh received here on Monday a letter for Sudanese President Umar al-Bashir over the latest regional developments, particularly in Darfour and the International Criminal Court decision.

The letter handed over by Director General of the National Security and Intelligence Service Gen. Salah Abdellah dealt also with brotherly relations and aspects of cooperation between the two countries.

President Saleh asked Sudanese envoy to convey a replying letter, confirming Yemeni solidarity with stability and security of Sudan. MD/AF

Russian presidential rep for Sudan arrives in Cairo, Egypt

April 06, 2009 report from Itar-Tass:
Russia presidential representative for Sudan arrives in Egypt

CAIRO, April 6 (Itar-Tass) -- Russian presidential representative for Sudan Mikhail Margelov arrived in Cairo on Monday to discuss with the Egyptian leadership the situation in Sudan and bilateral relations. In the Egyptian capital Margelov is to meet with Foreign Minister Ahmed Ali Aboul Gheit, Director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Services, General Omar Suleiman, Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa.

Margelov told Itar-Tass that the Cairo meetings would highlight such issues as the results of the Arab League summit in Qatar in the context of a visit to Doha of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, as well as the reaction of the Arab world on an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for the Sudanese leader.

Meanwhile, Mikhail Margelov, who heads the Russian society of solidarity with the peoples of Asia and Africa, will meet with the speaker of the National Assembly, Egyptian parliament, and the president of the Russia-Egypt Friendship Society, Fathi Surur, and the leadership of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO) in order to discuss bilateral political and economic relations.

Darfur crisis must end now, says Mbeki

April 06, 2009 report by Sapa-AFP via IOL:
Darfur crisis must end now, says Mbeki

The conflict in Darfur had dragged on for too long, former South African president Thabo Mbeki said at the weekend after talks with Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir.

Mbeki is in Khartoum leading a high-level African Union panel that is looking into the conflict for the African Union peace and security council.

"It has been very costly in all sorts of ways," he said. "Something must be done to end it as soon as possible."

The UN estimates that more than 300 000 people have died in Darfur since 2003.

South Sudan - Losing Hope: Citizen Perception of Peace and Reconciliation in the Three Areas

From Making Sense of Darfur
“For Us Here There Is No Government”
By Alex de Waal
April 05, 2009

Speaking in a focus group discussion reported by the National Democratic Institute’s study of the “three areas” of South Kordofan, Abyei and Blue Nile, a Nuba man complained that “The peace is now three years and there is supposed to be tangible things. The government should have expressed its presence, but for us here there is no government.” This is one among many worrying statements in this important report about the disappointing outcomes of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the fears of a return to war. People are notably more optimistic in Blue Nile. Abyei is flashpoint: the Ngok Dinka interviewees report that their relations with the Missiriya have been irreparably damaged and that they will all be voting to join the South. But the gravest messages come from the Nuba Mountains, where insecurity is still a major worry and inter-ethnic tensions are high.

Several issues of major concern stand out. One is that while people are all in favor of elections, most will vote along ethnic lines and many will not accept a governor who is not from their ethnicity (broadly construed). A second is that the process of “popular consultation” provided for in the CPA is not well-understood and most Nuba and Funj believe that they will participate in a referendum on their future. Underlying causes of conflict–notably land–have not been addressed. While the CPA designed these democratic processes to resolve the fraught questions of the political futures of these areas, an underlying message from the report is that people’s hopes were chiefly vested in the peace dividend, in the form of economic development.

The NDI report is entitled “Losing Hope: Citizen Perception of Peace and Reconciliation in the Three Areas,” and its cover shows a darkening sky. This is a warning.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb seeks to unify armed radical groups with emerging groups in Niger, Chad, Sudan, and Eritrea

From Gulf Daily News, Monday, April 06, 2009
Bouteflika warned by Al Qaeda

ALGIERS: Al Qaeda has warned Algerians against re-electing "ferocious enemy" President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Thursday's presidential vote.

The Algerian regime supports the West by seeking to destroy "true Islam," Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb said in a statement issued on Jihadist forums, the Site Intelligence Group reported.

It said Bouteflika is a "ferocious enemy" of Muslims.

The Al Qaeda group called on Muslims to overthrow rulers whose legislation fails to follow religious law.

Muslims, it added according to Site, must seek training and Jihad, abstain from the re-election of Bouteflika and his like, and support =the Mujahideen.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb seeks to unify armed radical groups in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco with emerging groups in countries such as Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and Eritrea.

Russian FM receives special envoy of Sudanese leader

From APA Sunday, 05 April 2009 via Borglobe.com:
Russian foreign minister receives special envoy of Sudanese leader

Moscow (Russia) The Sudanese Minister of Finance and National Economy, who is also special envoy of the Sudanese president, Omar al Bashir, was received in Moscow on Friday by the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, APA learns here Sunday.

The envoy, Awad Ahmed Al-Jaz, handed over a written message from President Al-Bashir to the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev.

During the closed door meeting, the two ministers discussed the main aspects of the state of, and prospects for Russian-Sudanese relations, with both sides reaffirming their strife to help develop political dialogue and economic cooperation in different fields of mutual interest, according to Russian Foreign Ministry sources.

In discussing the situation in Darfur, they expressed hope for a search for a political solution to the problem in cooperation with the United Nations, the African Union and other mediators. Al-Jaz gave assurances that the government of Sudan was firmly committed to settling the Darfur crisis through negotiations.

Al-Jaz further gave a high assessment of Russia’s position in support of the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Sudan.



Photo: On July 29, 2008, Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Zhai Jun held talks in the Foreign Ministry with visiting Sudanese President's special envoy Awad Ahmed al-Jaz, also Sudan's Minister of Finance and National Economy. Both sides exchanged in-depth views on bilateral ties and the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor's charge against the Sudanese leader.

Two million landmines buried in Sudan

From Sudan Radio Service, 05 April 2009 (Khartoum)

The National Centre for De-mining says that there are over two million landmines still buried in different parts of Sudan.

The announcement came as Sudan marked International Mine Awareness Day on Saturday, under the theme “Towards a Landmine-Free Sudan”.

In an interview with Sudan Radio Service on Saturday in Khartoum, the deputy director of the National De-mining Centre, Dr. Ahmed al-Badawi, said that lack of funding is a major problem facing the de-mining authorities in Sudan.

[Dr. Ahmed al-Badawi]:”There are approximately two million landmines buried in Sudan. There are many geographical and natural challenges facing de-miners and the de-mining process is very expensive, it needs a lot of funding. The biggest problem facing us is to get the funds for de-mining. We hope that the Government of National Unity will work and allocate major funding from its budget for fighting this sickness which is called landmines.”

According to Dr. al-Badawi, more than 20 states are affected by landmines. He said the most affected areas are the Equatorial states, Upper Nile, Bahr el-Ghazal, South and West Kordofan, Red Sea, Kassala, Blue Nile and Gedaref.”

SLM-Nur commander meets U.S. envoy in Jebel Marra

Associated Press report 05 April 2009:
Darfur commander meets US Envoy

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) - A top Darfur rebel commander says a visit by an envoy of President Barack Obama is positive but not enough for him to start talking peace with Sudan's government.

Ibrahim al-Helw, a commander in the Sudan Liberation Movement, says the visit on Sunday by J. Scott Gration to his group's stronghold in the mountainous rebel-controlled Jebel Marra area is a "step in the right direction." It was the first ever visit by a senior American official to the area controlled by the group led by exiled leader Abdelwahid Nur.

Al-Helw said Sudan's recent expulsion of aid groups from Darfur topped the discussion with Gration and added that a meningitis epidemic was breaking out in the region.

US, France unhappy about Arab & African support to Sudan's Bashir?

Thank goodness the UK has not been mentioned in this questionable article from Sudan Tribune, 05 April 2009. According to the article, Saudi owned Al-Hayat newspaper reported that an anonymous source said that both US President Obama and French President Sarkozy were disappointed at the backing of the Arab League and African Union to Sudanese President Al-Bashir. Also, the source said that the US and French leaders agreed to give their backing to the ICC warrant.

US, France unhappy about Arab & African support to Sudan’s Bashir: report - excerpt:

April 4, 2009 (PARIS) – The US and French government have agreed that the support lent by Arab states to embattled Sudanese president is “regrettable”, according to a news report.



Photo: France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy (L) shaking hand with U.S. President Barack Obama

The Saudi owned Al-Hayat newspaper quoting a source familiar with talks said that the US president Barack Obama and his French president Nicolas Sarkozy discussed the indictment of Sudanese president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court (ICC) last month.

Obama is visiting France for the summit of the North Atlantic Organization (NATO).

The source said that both Obama and Sarkozy were disappointed at the backing of the Arab League and African Union (AU) to Bashir.

Both organizations have expressed dissatisfaction at the ICC move against Bashir and alleged double standards in dealings with crimes worldwide.

The Arab League leadership summit held this week in Qatar issued a resolution rejecting of the ICC warrant and called on its members not to cooperate with the court.

The Arab leaders also described the ICC warrant as violation of international law preserving immunity of state officials and arguing that Sudan is not bound by the court’s decision because it has not ratified its founding Rome Statute.

AU officials said that African states who are ICC members will hold a meeting in June to discuss possibility of removing themselves from the court by unsigning the Rome Statute.

The source said that the US and French leaders agreed to give their backing to the ICC warrant. [...]