The United Nations is reportedly withdrawing staff in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan after an international prosecutor accused Sudan’s president of genocide.
While Darfur activists welcome action by the International Criminal Court (ICC), they warn against withdrawing UN forces, saying that it would set a dangerous precedent and it was important for the forces to stay.
International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo said last month that Sudan’s “entire state apparatus” was implicated in a campaign to attack civilians in Darfur, Reuters reported. He said he would present ICC judges with evidence implicating senior Sudanese officials in July.
Last week, it was reported that the prosecutor was seeking an arrest warrant for Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
Particularly damning evidence against the Sudanese Government has also surfaced with revelations from a senior Janjaweed commander that he and his forces were specifically recruited by the Government to mount a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against black southerners.
In a filmed interview with a British journalist, Mr Arbab Idries, a key Janjaweed commander between 2003 and 2007, told how he was instructed by a senior Sudanese Government figure to recruit Islamic Arabic speakers from the north of Sudan. The London Daily Telegraph reported descriptions of how he slaughtered Darfuri civilians – black men, women and children – looted villages, poured sand in their wells and cut down their trees.
“We wanted to force the population out of their areas and give them no chance to live there again. These instructions came from Khartoum,” he is reported to have said in the film.
