---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Ashworth <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 2:19 PM Subject: [sudan-john-ashworth] Irish components in Khartoum's military drones To: Group <[email protected]>
1. Why should we worry (like George Clooney) about war crimes in Sudan? Because the weapons used were made closer to home than you might think By AIDAN HARTLEY PUBLISHED: 21:00 GMT, 7 April 2012 UPDATED: 02:43 GMT, 8 April 2012 Daily Mail The military hardware that led to 14-year-old Daniel Omar's horrific injuries started life closer to home than you might think Under the glare of Sudan’s sun, a toddler points skywards at the metallic aircraft. Shouts of ‘Antonov!’ go out and everybody runs for cover in the mountain caves. The plane banks left in front of the sun, so it’s hard to make out, but the drone of the engines grows louder. Then come the thundering roar of explosions. I stagger out of my trench with the urge to run – to get anywhere safe. Terrified children look up at me; one has wet herself in fear. These bombings are a daily event in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. George Clooney visited the region last month, and on his return to the U.S. got himself arrested on the steps of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington in an attempt to gain world attention to the ethnic cleansing that is going on here. He is also helping to fund a network of private satellites to watch over the military movements of the Khartoum government, which is behind the terror attacks on its own people. A day later I’m in the one hospital for a million civilians in the region, Mother of Mercy in Gidel. I meet Daniel Omar, just 14, who had both arms amputated after they were torn to ribbons by fragments from an Antonov bomb blast. ‘He’s a tough kid,’ says Dr Tom Catena, the only surgeon in Nuba. ‘He never cried, not once. But this is a disaster. This is an agricultural society. If you can’t use your hands to work there’s not much you can do. The chance of him getting prosthetics is zero. 'Medically, he’ll recover and survive, but his future is bleak.’ This is a new war zone in Sudan. Nearly a decade after the horrors of Darfur, the man responsible for the mass deaths there, President Omar al-Bashir, is unleashing fresh attacks on his own citizens. In his blitz on villages he is using Antonov bombers, Sukhoi SU-25 attack jets and helicopter gunships. Nuba’s rebels showed me some of the weapons government forces are using: anti-personnel land mines from Iran, Chinese 302mm rockets and cluster bombs, mortar bombs from Greece – and a pilotless drone aircraft they shot down in a place called Jaw. It was filled with Iranian technology, and had an engine part stamped with the markings of Irish company Tillotson, whose company website homepage states it makes carburettors for unmanned aircraft. Under UN and European Union regulations, knowingly supplying military technology to either Iran or Sudan is illegal. But John Mason, Tillotson managing director, says his company complies with regulations and has no involvement in onward sales by his clients. He adds, ‘We have no sales on record to a company called Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Co or anything similar. The cover looks like it may be an original Tillotson cover, but it is impossible to tell whether or not the entire carburettor is original. 'Many carburettor manufacturers use our parts in their own products because they are readily available in the market. 'It appears to be equivalent to our HT-sized carburettor, which was designed for chainsaw applications. 'We have not calibrated it for specific use in any unmanned aircraft application.’ The drones are used to scout out targets ahead of Antonov bombing runs, providing real-time video footage for Khartoum’s forces. We were able to recover the data card from the drone and download several flight paths. As a result, we know that it flew over locations that were swiftly targeted in Antonov and Sukhoi attacks – including areas where we saw civilian casualties. A former UN investigator confirmed to me that this information could provide evidence in an International Criminal Court (ICC) trial of Bashir and his indicted lieutenants. In 2009, an almost identical drone was shot down in Darfur and was found to contain technology manufactured in the UK and sold via an Iranian front company based in Dubai. Despite the atrocities, Western governments are currently doing nothing about the crisis, while international relief agencies abandoned Nuba last year. By its inaction, the world has fallen into line with Bashir’s tactics. Some see Clooney’s arrest as a publicity stunt. But why is President Bashir – already indicted at the Hague for crimes against humanity in Darfur – able to get away with repeating the same patterns of violence in Nuba? The story of ethnic cleansing by means of violence and enforced starvation began for me with a video a man showed me on his phone when I arrived in the Nuba Mountains, an oil-rich region south of Khartoum. In the video, men are kicking a woman and two men and beating them with sticks. The victims are doused with petrol and set on fire. The figures feebly try crawling out of the leaping flames. The attackers rain more blows on them. Then they lie still. Local people say this is what happened in Kadugli weeks prior to South Sudan’s separation in July last year. Like the Southerners, the Nuba are black, mainly Christian Africans with a unique history and culture. During the civil war they had fought along with the southern rebels but in the peace accord that ended the conflict they were left north of the border in return for the promise of democratic representation. Instead, Bashir imposed a governor on Nuba who, like him, has been indicted by the ICC. Fresh fighting erupted, and the ethnic cleansing began. ‘There will be no time to speak of diversity of culture and ethnicity … Islam (will be) the official religion and Arabic the official language,’ Bashir thundered. ‘We will force them back into the mountains and starve them.’ I show the video to Siyam Musa, a local journalist who witnessed the violence in Kadugli last year. She claims the video was shot outside the United Nations compound. Survivors of Kadugli allege thousands were murdered. The Satellite Sentinel Project that George Clooney has sponsored has managed to identify mass graves in the vicinity of the UN compound. ‘They (Bashir’s Arab supporters) said they will exterminate the blacks,’ Siyam tells me in tears. She reveals the Arabs called the Nuba ‘black carrier bags’. ‘They said, “We don’t want any black carrier bags in Kadugli”’. UN peacekeepers were mandated to protect civilians. But when I visit the UN compound in Kauda, in another part of the Nuba Mountains, local people tell me how the peacekeepers stood by as the massacres escalated and then left altogether. It’s a chilling repeat of the UN inertia I witnessed in Rwanda in 1994. Kauda’s streets are lined with the logos of famous international aid agencies outside abandoned offices – from Save the Children to Concern Worldwide. There’s the children’s agency Unicef, which local people say last delivered vaccines and supplementary foods for starving children exactly a year ago. At the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), I walk through empty warehouses that could hold 2,000 tons of grain. Locals say the WFP last brought food to Nuba in January 2011. As the propeller drone of an Antonov becomes audible, children scurry into a cave mouth and wedge themselves under boulders. ‘We’ve lived like this for four months,’ Hanadi tells me, a mother living in caves to escape air raids. ‘We boil up leaves and wild fruits to eat.’ In the fields below Hanadi’s caves, rather than standing crops I see graves of Antonov victims. In Nuba, tens of thousands of civilians now hide in mountain caves. ‘We’re used to it now,’ farmer Mansur Nur tells me when I stay the night with him and his family at the mouth of a cave complex in the village of Tungule. 'Mansur says he and his family had fled to the hills after Khartoum’s militias burned his house, and looted his grain harvest and livestock. ‘If I had stayed the militias would have killed me.’ Mansur shows me his family’s supper – a plateful of grain he managed to buy cheap because it was contaminated by petrol. The next day I see him set off into the bush to forage for wild plants to eat. Meanwhile his daughters walk to school, a circle of grass huts under acacia trees. By driving farmers from their fields and preventing access by international relief agencies, Khartoum is generating a man-made famine. ‘Famine is already happening now,’ Dr Alamin Osman tells me at his clinic in the village of Tungule. Already 25 children have died of hunger here. Villagers I speak to have exhausted whatever stocks they had left over from 2010 – and in 2011 the war stopped the planting or harvest of crops. At the Mother of Mercy hospital Dr Tom Catena, who apart from Alamin is the only doctor in Nuba, tells me, ‘It’s much cheaper to starve people than to send weapons in and kill them. 'Food is a weapon, a very effective weapon. People don’t cultivate, don’t farm, you cut the road off, then you subjugate them very easily.’ The hospital was opened in 2008 with room for 80 in-patients. Now it houses 500. The staff consists of Dr Catena, an ex-U.S. Navy surgeon who arrived in Nuba four years ago as a lay missionary, plus two sisters and a group of young local students who walked in off the street and asked to work as nurses – they have no formal training. When patients are discharged, they refuse to leave – and so a village of tents and shacks is sprouting up around the edges of the hospital compound. ‘We encourage them to go home but they have no homes, and no food to eat, so they stay,’ says Sister Angelina Nyakuru, the Catholic hospital’s administrator. Priests are able to smuggle some supplies of food and medicines in via the one track that links Nuba Mountains to the frontier of South Sudan. But it isn’t enough. Sister Angelina says that hospital staff, treating wounded and starving patients, are themselves going without food. Dr Catena shows me a register of all the serious war injuries he’s operated on – 719 cases in the last nine months. The hospital register represents a fraction of the hundreds killed or wounded in nine months of air raids. Many are killed on the spot or die on the long trek to the hospital. I ask how many of the Antonov bombing injuries are civilians. ‘I’d say 80 per cent civilians. Antonov bombing isn’t accurate – it’s not a laser-guided weapon… kids are out with their cows and they drop a bomb on them.’ The injuries he must tackle, with limited equipment – no X-ray machine, a broken refrigerator, and nurses he’s trained on their feet – are gruesome beyond words. ‘That’s a leg injury and here is a wound to the eye.’ He leans over a baby girl with blood running from her eye socket. ‘I can’t see the eye, I have tried to open it up and the child is screaming so I can’t see it. But I think the eye has been destroyed.’ Dr Catena works all day every day without any break. When he leaves the wards he’s on call round the clock. He has not left the hospital compound since October 2010. I ask him how he does it. ‘What are my options – leave and abandon everyone here or stay and keep going ahead? I don’t really dwell on it too much, you keep going. 'Eventually things will clear up. As long as the strength is there, you keep going.’ Dr Catena and Sister Angelina know that if Khartoum’s forces reach the hospital, they may be murdered. Sudan’s government has said it will shoot down relief planes and it has denied all entry to journalists and aid workers. ‘They don’t want you guys here. They don’t want me here,’ says Dr Catena. Sister Angelina stands in the middle of a ward, near a man who has relapsing leprosy because the drugs to treat this medieval disease were stopped by Khartoum last year. ‘Where is the international community?’ she says. ‘Our people had dignity. They worked for themselves, cultivated their land, got their own food, never came and begged from us. Never. ‘Now where is the UN security council, powerful nations who could stop this suffering? 'For how long will this situation go on?’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2125043/George-Clooney-arrested-Washington-war-crimes-Sudan-got-you.html END1 2. NUBA MOUNTAINS CIVILIANS URGE ICC TO ARREST BASHIR Sudan Catholic Radio Network Wednesday, 11 April 2012 14:26 Civilians from the Nuba Mountains are appealing to the ICC, the International Criminal Court, to arrest the President of Sudan after an Antonov bombed today Heiban. The Antonov from the Sudan Air Force bombed areas of Mirea, Kauda airstrip and Irisallia, injuring a 12 year-old boy. Student Munir I. said President Omar Al Bashir is increasing war crimes by bombing and killing innocent civilians and cattle. He urged the ICC court to arrest Mr Al Bashir because he is doing what the student called genocide and crimes against humanity. Hanna A. said she was sad with the arbitrarily killings of innocent people. She also called on The Hague Court to see a solution for Mr Al Bashir to be removed from power. Many people tired of continuous air raids over Nuba Mountains are urging the ICC to do something to end their suffering. http://catholicradionetwork.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6483:nuba-mountains-civilians-urge-icc-to-arrest-bashir&catid=2:south-sudan&Itemid=84 END2 3. NUBA MOUNTAINS FARMERS URGED TO PREPARE FOR CULTIVATION Sudan Catholic Radio Network Tuesday, 10 April 2012 14:57 Nuba Mountains farming communities were urged to prepare their lands for cultivation ahead of the incoming rainy season. Secretary for agriculture and food Security Jamil Makki Abdu called on farmers to prepare the fields as the rains are approaching. He added said at least each individual has to have one hectare of land to plant to increase the production of food Mr Makki asked people to dig trenches in the fields to get protection from air raids. Last year, many farmers in different parts of Nuba Mountains could not pursue their cultivation due to the insecurity posed by the Sudan Armed Forces and their air bombardments. http://catholicradionetwork.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6475:nuba-mountains-farmers-urged-to-prepare-for-cultivation&catid=2:south-sudan&Itemid=84 END3 ______________________ John Ashworth Sudan, South Sudan Advisor [email protected] +254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile) +211 919 695 362 (South Sudan mobile) +27 82 050 1235 (South Africa mobile) +44 750 304 1790 (UK/international) +88 216 4334 0735 (Thuraya satphone) PO Box 52002 - 00200, Nairobi, Kenya This is a personal e-mail address and the contents do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation -- The content of this message does not necessarily reflect John Ashworth's views. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, John Ashworth is not the author of the content and the source is always cited. 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