Press Release

SHRO-Cairo Calls for Constitutional National Conference
to Stop Crimes Against Humanity in Western Upper Nile and DarFur

March 22, 2003

SHRO-Cairo received a copy of a field report prepared by John Gachie of University of Wales, United Kingdom, on the situation of Western Upper Nile.

The Gachie Report documents the Sudan Government’s ongoing crimes against humanity in the South, in general, and the Western Upper Nile (Unity State), in particular.

“Access to the area by humanitarian agencies has been woefully restricted, even when possible, is largely ineffectual… tool little, too late… Western Upper Nile,” says the report. Western Upper Nile “is facing an atmosphere of raw fear and horror not experienced elsewhere in the Sudan, and very rarely in the outside world.” The Report depicts the region as “the world last regional torture chamber,” a twin genocide area of the Rwanda and the Balkans.

The Report clearly links the root causes of the armed conflict and disaster of the area with the Khartoum Government, which in its “endeavours to effect its hegemony-control over the oil deposits, played off one side [of the local competing groups] against the other by the provision of weapons, financial and material support, initially through the Baggara and Muraheleen Arab militia in the fighting over grazing lands with the Nuer and the Dinka… Hell on earth seems to have relocated since the very late of ‘70s to southern Sudan, with the epi-centre of this latter-day Heart of Darkness being Western Upper Nile Province.”

SHRO-Cairo has earlier pointed out similar facts regarding the government’s responsibility for the deteriorating conditions of the Upper Nile, Bahr al-Ghazal, and DarFur regions. As this most recent report documents, by massive displacement and militia hunting operations of the innocent citizens of these war-trodden areas, “Sudan Government is pursuing the key military objective of clearing the people off the land so as to exploit the Province’s rich oil deposit without reference to the area’s people. This bespeaks a racial hatred that calls for the world attention, censure and boycott as much as apartheid did in South Africa.”

SHRO-Cairo strongly supports the John Gachie’s Report, which adds factual materials to earlier reports by Dave Peterson, that documented Apartheid policies against the displaced southerners in the deserts of Khartoum, as well as the SHRO-Cairo field reports by Abdeon Agaw and other Sudanese researchers in the Bahr al-Ghazal and the Upper Nile regions on the Sudan Government’s dehumanizing practices against the innocent citizens of these regions.

The Organization reiterates its prompt call for the National Democratic Alliance, the United Nations, the IGAD, and the US Government to exert all possible pressure on the ruthless regime of Khartoum to immediately:

· Stop all military operations in the Western Upper Nile Province;

· Disarm all government-controlled militias;

· Allow uninterrupted food and relief operations;

· Put on trial all military commanders who committed crimes against humanity in the area.

SHRO-Cairo realizes that the continuous deterioration of security and peace in DarFur is organically linked with the armed conflict the Khartoum central government has recklessly escalated since 1989 in the country.

The Organization calls on the National Democratic Alliance, the United Nations, IGAD and the regional concerned entities, the US Government, and the Government of Sudan to convene a national constitutional conference for the Sudan’s civil society and political parties to put to task the Comprehensive Political Solution, which is the only possible way to end the Sudan’s Crisis that is systematically escalated by the Khartoum Government’s unrelenting war-mongering, reign of terror, and crimes against humanity.

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Sudan Care has just received a 32-page illustrated booklet (pdf format 1.57 MB, requiring Adobe Acrobat) on the situation in Western Upper Nile in July 2002, published by Norwegian People's Aid (NPA).

Here is a link to it:
<http://www.sudancare.org/WUN-NPA-July2002.pdf>

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