Sudan admits rights abuses

KHARTOUM, Sudan (Agence France-Presse) — Sudan’s foreign minister acknowledged yesterday that there had been human rights violations in the strife-torn Darfur region, where an estimated 10,000 people have died over the past year, but denied that there was any “ethnic cleansing.”

Mustafa Ismail spoke after Khartoum welcomed a U.N. human rights panel’s mildly worded text on suspected government-backed atrocities in the region, which was adopted over U.S. objections.

“Yes, human rights violations have occurred in Darfur, but one cannot in any way talk of ethnic cleansing or collective extermination,” Mr. Ismail told a press conference as a U.N. team arrived in Darfur to investigate refugee reports of atrocities committed against black Africans by Arab militias backed by Khartoum.

U.N. officials and human rights groups say the militias, known as “janjaweed,” are terrorizing black inhabitants of the region, killing them or sending them into government-run camps or fleeing to neighboring Chad.

The fighting began in February 2003 after local residents accused Khartoum of marginalizing them. Peace talks in the Chadian capital of Ndjamena have made no progress.

Fifty members of the U.N. rights body last week approved the document agreed to by the European Union and a bloc of African nations, prompting the United States to demand in vain a second vote for stronger action.

The Darfur rebellion, spurred in part by the region’s dire poverty, has claimed some 10,000 lives since it erupted last year.

It has also displaced about 1 million people inside Sudan and forced more than 100,000 others to flee to Chad, according to U.N. estimates.

Mr. Ismail said the government had decided to act in order to “re-establish order and to call to account any group that violates the law and attacks the citizens of Darfur.”

He also said the government had decided to ease the delivery of humanitarian aid to Darfur, denying that there is either famine or epidemic in the region.

Sudan’s civil war erupted in 1983 when rebels took up arms to end domination of the mainly Christian and animist south by the largely Arab Muslim north.

That conflict, along with war-related famine and disease, has claimed at least 1.5 million lives and displaced more than 4 million people.