---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "John Ashworth" <[email protected]> Date: 6 Jul 2017 11:09 Subject: [sudans-john-ashworth] International Community Shouldn’t Commit The Irreparable in Darfur To: "Group" <[email protected]> Cc:
1. International Community Shouldn’t Commit The Irreparable in Darfur Aicha Elbasri, Ph.D., ContributorFormer UN diplomat and winner of the 2015 Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling. The second to blow the whistle on Darfur after Mukesh Kapila. Huffington Post 06/29/2017 10:25 am ET Thirteen years ago, the international community declared that genocide was taking place in Darfur. However, the UN dismissed the concerns of the US Congress and the European Parliament, while grudgingly recognising merely that atrocities were taking place in the western region of Sudan. Consequently, peacekeepers were dispatched to protect civilians. Today, the UN is again misleading the international community by defending its plan to cut by nearly half the existing peacekeeping force, which will undoubtedly put millions of civilian lives at risk. This decision is based on the very UN lies, deceit and cover-ups that I witnessed when I served as the spokesperson for the UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) between August 2012 and April 2013. During the eight months I served in Darfur, I saw how UNAMID‘s leadership perpetuated the Big Lie: its first chief, the Congolese politician Rodolphe Adada, declared in 2009 that Darfur’s war was over. Supported by the department of peacekeeping operations (DPKO) based in New York, UNAMID chiefs and senior managers covered up Khartoum’s horrendous crimes by reducing the war in Darfur to a “counter-insurgency conflict” opposing the Sudanese government and Darfur rebels. This deception allowed them to hide the other and most devastating war, the one the Arab-supremacist regime of Omar al-Bashir has been waging against Darfur civilians, mostly of non-Arab origins, for over a decade now. For years, UNAMID and DPKO used every trick to conceal the truth about the deliberate government bombing, mass killings and forced displacement of unarmed civilians from the ethnic Zaghawa, Fur and Massalit populations. UNAMID and DPKO kept silent too about the systematic mass rape of women and girls, and many other atrocities that they were carefully documenting, including the government-orchestrated massacre of Arab nomads in Khartoum’s gold war in Jebel Amer. Throughout my time in Darfur, I also witnessed how UNAMID chiefs and their counterparts in New York concealed the fact that the Sudanese government, instead of disarming the infamous Janjaweed militias as demanded by the UN Security Council resolution 1556 (2004), had brazenly transformed, super-armed, and re-branded them as the Rapid Support Forces, an even more lethal force under the command of the country’s notoriously vicious intelligence services. Refusing to be part of the UN’s conspiracy against innocent civilians, I resigned my post, putting an end to my 10 year UN career to expose the UN cover-up. My testimony, supported by a Foreign Policy investigation, prompted the International Criminal Court to call on the then UN chief, Ban Ki-moon to conduct a “thorough, independent and public inquiry.” Instead, Ban set up an in-house review that found that UNAMID routinely concealed from the UN headquarters evidence revealing the responsibility of Sudanese government forces for deadly attacks against civilians and peacekeepers. Yet, despite a plethora of incriminating facts, Ban’s review insisted that there was no evidence of an intentional cover-up. Today, it’s clear that Ban’s failure to properly investigate and hold UN wrongdoers to account has only encouraged both UNAMID and DPKO to continue their distortion, claiming once more that the war is over and the time has come to begin withdrawing peacekeepers from the scene of ongoing atrocities. On 14 June, the Assistant Secretary-General for peacekeeping operations, El-Ghassim Wane, told the UN Security Council that the Sudanese government had reduced the rebellion to a small presence in Darfur and that the security situation had largely improved to the extent that he recommended 44% and 30% reductions in UNAMID troops and police, a step towards an ultimate exit. “The planned cuts reflect a false narrative about Darfur’s war ending,” commented Daniel Bekele, from Human Rights Watch. Indeed, Mr. Wane only spoke about the subsiding counter-insurgency conflict, and said nothing about the UN-protected war, the one waged by the Sudanese government against non-Arab civilians. He missed a golden opportunity to tell the 15-member body that UNAMID’s own report covering the first quarter of 2017 noted a significant increase in human rights violations and abuses compared with the same period in 2016, and stressed that Sudanese government forces continued to prevent the peacekeepers from protecting civilians. Wane didn’t tell the Council that the Rapid Support Forces, meaning the Janjaweed death-squads, are still around, attacking and terrorizing unarmed women, men and children in Darfur camps. These super-empowered militias attacked hundreds of villages in 2015 and 2016 and assaulted many more in May 2017, according to Human Rights Watch and other credible sources. How could Wane or any other honorable official recommend reducing nearly half UNAMID troops when Darfur remains under a state of emergency as nearly 2.7 million forcibly displaced people, with over 1.6 million living in 60 camps? How could they suggest cutting 36 team sites to 18, when they know that each of these sites is a safe zone for thousands of civilians fleeing relentless Janjaweed attacks? Where will Darfuri people seek safety and shelter if dangerously abandoned by the international community? If UNAMID leaves, who would escort the humanitarian workers who strive to save lives in the forgotten Darfur? The Security Council must respond to these questions when it meets to renew the mandate for UNAMID before the end of June 2017. Instead of withdrawing the much-needed troops, the UN body should be suggesting ways to stop the ongoing slaughter of civilians in Darfur by bringing viable and sustainable peace, and holding the Sudanese regime genocidaires into account. By surrendering to Wane and the others’ weak and wicked withdrawal plans, the Security Council, and the world’s democracies which spearhead it, will fulfil the Sudanese regime’s desire to have no international witnesses on the ground when it finishes off its genocidal agenda. The Council members should know that every single Blue Helmeted peacekeeper departing Darfur will leave behind hundreds of thousands of unprotected civilians. Allowing the beginning of UNAMID’s exit is a major step in normalizing genocide and other atrocities in Darfur and beyond. At the end of this month, the Council will have a historic chance for avoiding irreparable harm in Darfur. I sincerely hope it will seize it. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/international-community- shouldnt-commit-the-irreparable_us_595509dfe4b0f078efd987b1 END1 2. Enough Project’s Prendergast Responds to Comments by U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Koutsis on Sudan Sanctions June 28, 2017 – John Prendergast, Founding Director of the Enough Project, has responded to comments made by Steven Koutsis, the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in Sudan, in regard to the sanctions on the Sudanese government. July 12 is the deadline for the Trump administration to make a decision on whether to terminate the longstanding comprehensive sanctions on Sudan, a process that began during the last days of the Obama administration. John Prendergast, Founding Director of the Enough Project, said: "The U.S. Charge d'Affaires in Khartoum says that human rights were not part of the reason comprehensive sanctions were originally placed on the Sudan government. At the very least, it is important for American diplomats to tell the truth about America's foreign policy motivations. I was part of the U.S. government team in 1997 that produced the Executive Order placing comprehensive sanctions on Sudan. In addition to our concern for the regime's support for al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, the sanctions were driven by a desire to impose a consequence for the regime's atrocious human rights record. At that time the Khartoum government was using the withholding of humanitarian aid as a weapon of war, aerially bombing villages, and persecuting Christians and other religious minorities. Those were major factors driving support for these sanctions from Congress and within the Clinton administration. And the support for these sanctions on the basis of human rights and terrorism concerns was a bipartisan effort. All of those patterns of behavior have continued over the past twenty years. In the decade following the 1997 Executive Order, the Bush administration imposed further sanctions as a result of the genocide in Darfur, which at its root is a human rights catastrophe with few 21st century parallels. For an American diplomat twenty years later to claim human rights are not part of the U.S. sanctions equation is not accurate or responsible. We hope that the Trump administration will not use faulty or biased criteria in its assessment as to whether to permanently lift sanctions when it makes its decision on July 12, and we urge administration officials and Congress to examine the evidence that government-sponsored violence and humanitarian aid obstruction have not ended." For media inquiries or interview requests, please contact: Megha Swamy at [email protected]. END2 ______________________ John Ashworth [email protected] +254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile) +211 919 695 362 (South Sudan mobile) +44 787 976 8030 (UK mobile) +88 216 4334 0735 (Thuraya satphone) Skype: jashworth1 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. You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sudan-john-ashworth" group. 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