4 Sept 06 – Responding this morning to news of Sudan’s expulsion of the African Union Mission in Darfur, Dr James Smith, Chief Executive of the Aegis Trust, stated:
“Ordering the AU Mission to leave will make it virtually impossible for aid agencies to continue operating in Darfur. Three million people, predominantly Darfur’s black Africans, are reliant on the food aid and humanitarian relief they provide. By crippling that lifeline, the Government of Sudan is ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’. Under the terms of the United Nations Genocide Convention, this constitutes genocide. Millions of lives are in grave and immediate danger. The genocide now faced could be on the scale of that in Rwanda in 1994. The Government of Sudan will bear full responsibility for lives lost, whether through starvation or further violence.”
United Nations Resolution 1706, passed Thursday 31 August, authorised a transferral from the AU mission in Darfur to a UN peacekeeping mission comprising 17,000 troops, on condition of Khartoum’s acceptance. Khartoum immediately rejected the resolution.
Sudan is already conducting a major new military offensive in Darfur, in contravention of the DPA and numerous previous commitments. Between 250,000 and 400,000 people have been killed through starvation and deliberate acts of violence in past three years, and up to a third of Darfur’s African women have been raped. The concentration of 2.5million Darfuri Africans in IDP camps will render them extremely vulnerable to Janjaweed and Government attack in the absence of any international presence. Claims that the IDP camps are strongholds for African rebels who did not sign the Darfur Peace Agreement could be used by the Sudanese Government to justify devastating attacks on these population centres.
Day for Darfur – 17 September
The Aegis Trust is part of a global coalition behind the ‘Day for Darfur’, scheduled for 17 September, which will see activists in New York, Abuja, London, Nairobi, Paris, Berlin, Kigali and a string of other major cities demonstrating in support of the proposed UN peacekeeping force for Darfur and calling on Sudan to accept the resolution. Organisers are calling on the public to don ‘blue hats’ on the day as a sign of their support. See www.dayfordarfur.org for more information.
