[allAfrica.com] [Africa_2004] Documents Link Khartoum to Jingaweit, Human Rights Watch Says United States Department of State (Washington, DC) NEWS July 19, 2004 Posted to the web July 20, 2004 By Judy Aita Washington, DC Group calls for strong Security Council resolution on Sudan Calling for sanctions against Sudanese government officials, Human Rights Watch officials July 19 revealed Sudanese government documents that they say provide "incontrovertible" proof that government officials directed recruitment, arming, and other support for the Jingaweit militia in Darfur. At a press conference at U.N. headquarters, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, described four documents obtained by the organization. "The Sudanese government had maintained that the Jingaweit militia are an autonomous entity, that Khartoum has no control over the marauding atrocities committed by the Jingaweit. In fact, what these documents show is that the government in Khartoum has been supporting the Jingaweit as a matter of official policy. They have been supporting them through recruitment, through armament, and through a policy of impunity, at least with respect to some of the atrocities committed by the Jingaweit," Roth said. The Arabic-language documents cover the period from November 2003 to March 2004 and are from government authorities in Khartoum and North and South Darfur to local leaders. Human Rights Watch officials did not show the original documents. They allowed journalists to look at the English translations but did not provide copies for fear of endangering their source. The documents, they said, were provided by a longtime credible source who has proven reliable in the past. The documents from February and March 2004 are particularly damning, Roth said. A February 12 directive from the office of the commissioner of North Darfur, which was sent less than one week after Khartoum declared that it had ended support for the militias, calls for the increased recruitment and military support to "allied" or "loyalist" tribes and urges the design of a plan to settle "nomads" in areas from which civilians have fled. Roth called such a resettlement policy "ethnic cleansing." A February 13 directive orders all security units in the area to permit the activities of Jingaweit leader Musa Hilal in North Darfur. The document "highlights the importance of non-interference so as not to question their authority" and authorizes security units in a North Darfur province to "overlook minor offenses by the fighters against civilians who are suspected members of the rebellion," the Human Rights Watch director said. A March directive from the office of the governor of South Darfur to the commissioner of Nyala, the largest town and capital of South Darfur, calls for the formation of a security committee and an increase in the level of recruitment to ensure that "the activities of the outlaws [i.e., rebels] are not brought into the state" and asks the commissioner to "swiftly deliver provisions and ammunition to the new camps to secure the southwestern part of the state," Roth said. In a written report, Human Rights Watch said that the documents "confirm the government of Sudan's policy of official support to the Jingaweit militia. They illustrate patterns of official recruitment and military support to the militias by officials from a variety of levels in the Sudanese government, a pattern that cannot be dismissed as arbitrary or as the actions of individuals over-reaching their authority." "The directives issued by government officials illustrate the extent to which the government-backed militias are used as auxiliaries in the military campaign and a fundamental tool and instrument of government policy and military strategy," the report said. Roth said that a U.N. Security Council resolution that focuses exclusively on Darfur is urgently needed. He criticized the draft resolution currently under consideration in the Security Council for aiming to impose sanctions only on Jingaweit leaders and not being tough enough on Khartoum. "One of the things these documents show is that there is a need to look beyond the Jingaweit themselves. There is a need to go past the fiction maintained by Khartoum that there is a serious distinction between the Sudanese government and the Jingaweit militia that that government has sponsored," he said. Human Rights Watch wants the Security Council to impose sanctions on individual members of the Sudanese government, not simply on the leaders of the Jingaweit, Roth said. "Given this policy of complicity that these documents demonstrate, we believe it is essential that the Security Council establish a commission of inquiry to look into the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed and to identify the people behind it," he said. "We can no longer trust Khartoum to police itself when Khartoum seems to be such a large part of the problem." Given allegations that Jingaweit are being incorporated into Sudanese police and military forces, an essential ingredient of any Security Council resolution on Darfur should be an international monitoring force to ensure that government pledges to disband the militia are carried out, Roth said. "There is also a desperate need for significant international military presence in Darfur well beyond the modest deployment of the African Union so far" to protect returning refugees, he added. The Security Council has scheduled a private meeting July 21 with the U.N. special envoy for Sudan, Jan Pronk. Pronk recently returned from Sudan, where he attended the first meeting of the group monitoring Khartoum's compliance with the communiqué it signed during Secretary-General Kofi Annan's visit earlier this month. Returning to his office from his trip to Africa, Annan said July 19 that he is waiting for reports from Pronk, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the High Commissioner for Human Rights before deciding whether Sudan is abiding by the communiqué. U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard reported that U.N. officials attending the monitoring group meeting in Khartoum said that although humanitarian access to the camps had improved, there had been no progress on security and protection of internally displaced persons in the region. Instead, air raids and attacks by the Jingaweit and government-aligned militia were making the displaced persons too afraid to return to their villages. Human Rights Watch is an independent, nongovernmental organization, headquartered in Hew York City, that conducts fact-finding investigations into human rights abuses by governments and non-state actors in all regions of the world. (The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov.)   =============================================================================   Copyright © 2004 United States Department of State. All rights reserved. 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