The Australian
July 14, 2008 12:26am AEST | Make this site your homepage
Sudan 'ordered Darfur massacres'
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Correspondents in London and Cairo | July 14, 2008
A HIGH-RANKING commander who armed and led Janjaweed militiamen in attacks on
hundreds of villages in Darfur has admitted he did so at the behest of the
Sudanese Government.
His admission comes as prosecutors at the International Criminal Court are
today expected to take a significant step towards putting Sudan's leaders on
trial by presenting evidence against President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
Also yesterday, the BBC reported the first evidence that China was helping
Sudan's Government militarily in Darfur, after tracking down Chinese army
trucks in the Sudanese province that came from a batch exported from China to
Sudan in 2005.
Such aid contravenes a UN arms embargo, which requires foreign nations to
ensure they do not militarily assist anyone in the conflict in Darfur.
The UN estimates about 300,000 people have died in ethnic massacres in Darfur
at the hands of Arabic-speaking militias. The US has described those deaths as
genocide. A further 2.5 million refugees have been driven from homes.
A Sudanese government spokesman warned that an indictment of Mr Bashir for war
crimes in Darfur would be "disastrous" for the region.
"If an international organisation or the organisations working in the
humanitarian field are behind such an indictment of the head of state, our
symbol of national sovereignty, then no one should expect us to turn our left
cheek," Mahjoub Fadul Badry told the Arabiyah news channel.
As the ICC pursues its case against Sudan's rulers in Khartoum, evidence that
the killing was directed by the Government has been provided by Arbab Idries,
who was a key commander between 2003 and last year.
Mr Idries described how he was instructed by a senior government figure to
recruit Islamic Arabic speakers from the north of Sudan, then led 5000 horsemen
in a murderous campaign against black southerners who did not share their
religion, Britain's Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported. He admitted his troops
committed rapes and killed old people and children.
"We were attacking villages where there were only the blacks," the paper quotes
Mr Idries as saying. A Muslim, he is himself black, as were many of his men.
"These people were civilians. They had no weapons."
For several years, Idries was one of the most feared men in a savage conflict.
The Khartoum Government has always argued the massacres were the result of
tribal disputes in a remote area in which it had no hand. But the detailed
account Mr Idries has given about the campaign of slaughter could prove vital
in the case against Sudan's rulers.
The Sunday Telegraph reported that Idries had fallen out with the regime and
went into hiding to strike a deal with international prosecutors.
Mr Idries's account outlines a clearly thought-out campaign of "ethnic
cleansing" by ferocious horsemen who despised the Darfuris as racial inferiors.
"When we entered a village we were to steal and loot whatever we could," he
said. "As for the water wells, we put sand in and blocked them. We cut down
trees and burnt villages. 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 claims to have played a key role in the slaughter from its outset in 2003,
when at a secret meeting he was first ordered to recruit northerners to drive
out rebels and civilians. He said a government figure told him: "We need only
land. We don't need the people there."
He said the Sudanese Government wanted to kill him. "I know too much - I
handled too much money and did too many things," he said.
He also repeated claims that China, which has oil interests in Sudan, supported
the campaign of killing.
The BBC reported it had been told that China was training fighter pilots who
fly Chinese A5 Fantan fighter jets in Darfur.
The Panorama program found a Chinese Dong Feng army truck in the hands of one
of Darfur's rebel groups. The BBC established through independent eyewitness
testimony that the rebels had captured it from Sudanese government forces in
December.
The rebels filmed a second truck with the BBC's camera. Both vehicles had been
carrying anti-aircraft guns, one a Chinese gun.. Markings showed they were from
a batch of 212 Dong Feng army trucks the UN had traced as having arrived in
Sudan after the arms embargo was put in place.
They came straight from the factory in China to Sudan and were consigned to
Sudan's Defence Ministry, the BBC said. The guns were mounted after the trucks
were imported from China.
China's Government declined to comment on the BBC findings.
AP
Copyright 2008 News Limited. All times AEST (GMT +10).
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