The US military is considering sending a team to Chad to assess conditions for a possible humanitarian mission that would help refugees from Sudan's strife-plagued Darfur region, a radio report said on Thursday.
The Voice of America (VOA) quoted a senior Pentagon official as saying the US military's European Command was preparing to send a Humanitarian Assessment Survey Team (HAST) to Chad, where many refugees have fled to avoid the conflict in neighboring western Sudan.
The ethnic conflict, which has overshadowed the recent settlement of another conflict in the country's south, has left 30,000 people dead and displaced another 1 million people as Janjaweed militia, reportedly with government backing, attacked black Muslim rebels in the region.
The US team would be similar to the HAST unit sent to Liberia last year as the country faced anarchy. The US European Command, which is responsible for Africa, would send to Chad a team that could include military specialists who would assess needs for a possible civil-military operation, the VOA said.
The official, who was unnamed by the VOA, said no decision had been made yet to send out the HAST team. But Pentagon officials indicated they were watching developments there closely.
UN Secretary-general Kofi Annan said on Thursday that the Sudanese government had denied any involvement in the killings. While the killings of civilians in Darfur violated international humanitarian law, Annan said they could not be described as genocide or ethnic cleansing.
Annan said he would visit Sudan next month to look into the humanitarian situation in the region.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the Pentagon had not been asked to consider a mission.
In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, UN Children's Agency director Carol Bellamy asked for urgent international help for displaced people in the Darfur region.
"The race is against time to come to the aid of 1 million internally displaced people before the onset of the rainy season shortly," Bellamy said. The rains will bog down aid transports.
She met earlier this week in Khartoum with Sudanese President Omer Hassan al-Bashir, who she said pledged his government would ensure basic services to civilians in Darfur. Sudan is under international pressure to open access for humanitarian groups to the region. Other UN agencies and international organizations, including the Red Cross, were also working in Darfur.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS