Sudan violence may amount to war crimes, ex-UN envoy says

PanARMENIAN.Net - Aerial bombardment and ground attacks by government forces in Sudan's restive south are targeting civilians as well as armed rebels and may amount to war crimes, a former senior United Nations official said, according to Reuters.

Mukesh Kapila was the UN head of mission in Sudan in 2003, when rebels in the country's western Darfur region took up arms against the central government. The government mobilized troops and allied militias there to put down the revolt.

Hundreds of thousands died in the ensuing conflict, many of them civilians caught in the fighting or struck down by disease.

Returning to Sudan this month, Kapila said he went on a ten-day tour of rebel-held areas in South Kordofan and Blue Nile border states and found evidence of abuses that amounted to systematic ethnic cleansing.

"What's happened over the last two odd years ... is basically exactly the same tactics as Darfur except in the interim period the technology of war has improved," Kapila told Reuters in an interview.

Sudan's government insists its forces have committed no war crimes but says the rebels have sown chaos in South Kordofan and Blue Nile and are guilty of grave abuses.

Asked to comment on Kapila's findings, Rabie Abdelatie, a senior member of the ruling National Congress Party in Khartoum, said they were "completely incorrect".

"The government's responsibility is to protect civilians," said Abdelatie.

Armed revolts broke out in South Kordofan and Blue Nile around the time neighboring South Sudan declared independence in 2011.

Kapila said 2.5 million people now had limited or no access to humanitarian assistance.

"This is the world's biggest human rights disaster," said Kapila, who now works as a special representative for the Aegis Trust, an organization that campaigns to prevent genocide. "The tactics they are using point towards war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed with the circumstantial evidence that it is quite strongly ethnically based."

He urged the international community to use diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions to push Sudan to allow humanitarian access to the rebel-controlled border areas.

Kapila, whose assignment as UN envoy ended in 2004, was speaking in the capital of South Sudan, which split away from Khartoum under the terms of the peace deal that ended the two-decade conflict.