The UN on Friday warned of soaring human rights violations in Sudan’s Darfur region and said they were “verging on pure evil,” amid escalating fighting seven months into the war between the army and paramilitaries.
“We keep saying that the situation is horrific and grim, but frankly, we are running out of words to describe the horror of what is happening in Sudan,” UN Deputy Special Representative for Sudan Clementine Nkweta-Salami said.
“We continue to receive unrelenting and appalling reports of sexual and gender-based violence, enforced disappearance, arbitrary detentions and grave violations of human and children’s rights,” she told reporters.
Photo: Reuters
“What is happening is verging on pure evil,” she said, citing reports of young girls being raped in front of their mothers.
She said that she was worried about the risk of a repeat of the genocide of the early 2000s in the region of western Sudan.
Since April, forces loyal to General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan — Sudan’s de facto head of state — have been at war with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, former deputy chairman of the Sudanese Transitional Sovereignty Council.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) pointed to reports that more than 800 people had been killed by armed groups in Ardamata in West Darfur, an area that so far had been less affected by the conflict.
“We have received these reports from new arrivals in Chad, these are refugees fleeing the Darfur area, that are talking about armed militia going from house to house killing men and boys,” UNHCR spokesman William Spindler told reporters in Geneva, Switzerland. “These killings reportedly have happened in the last few days.”
Ardamata among other things houses a camp for people displaced inside Sudan, where UNHCR said nearly 100 shelters had been razed to the ground.
It also said in a statement that extensive looting had taken place, including of UNHCR relief items.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi echoed Nkweta-Salami’s warning of the danger of a repeat of the horrors unleashed two decades ago when the government of former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir unleashed the Janjaweed militia in response to a rebel uprising.
“Twenty years ago, the world was shocked by the terrible atrocities and human rights violations in Darfur,” Grandi said in a statement. “We fear a similar dynamic might be developing.”
UNHCR said that it was preparing for a new flood of refugees from the region into Chad, which is already hosting hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees.
More than 10,000 people have been killed in the Sudan conflict so far, according to a conservative estimate by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project.
However, aid groups and medics have repeatedly warned the real toll exceeds recorded figures, with many of those wounded and killed never reaching hospitals or morgues.
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
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
The US government has banned US government personnel in China, as well as family members and contractors with security clearances, from any romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, The Associated Press (AP) has learned. Four people with direct knowledge of the matter told the AP about the policy, which was put into effect by departing US ambassador Nicholas Burns in January shortly before he left China. The people would speak only on condition of anonymity to discuss details of a confidential directive. Although some US agencies already had strict rules on such relationships, a blanket “nonfraternization” policy, as it is known, has