Fwd: [sudans-john-ashworth] International Community Shouldn’t Commit The Irreparable in Darfur

[Elisabeth Janaina]

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From: "John Ashworth" <ashwor...@gmail.com>
Date: 6 Jul 2017 11:09
Subject: [sudans-john-ashworth] International Community Shouldn’t Commit The Irreparable in Darfur
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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 msw...@enoughproject.org.

END2

______________________
John Ashworth

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