A report issued by a UN commission prompted Khartoum this week to plead with the world body to defer war crime trials, writes Gamal Nkrumah First the good news. A sense of uneasy calm prevails over southern Sudan after a 9 January comprehensive peace agreement between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), the country's most powerful armed opposition group. But Sudan is not out of the woods yet. Some of the most ferocious battles in Sudan are still raging on in Darfur. "We are speaking about a severely deteriorating situation. There is no place for optimism," International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Africa Chief Christopher Harnisch declared this week after a tour of Darfur. Jan Pronk, the United Nations envoy for Sudan Jan Pronk concurred with Harnisch and said that the Sudanese government cannot rein in allied militias persecuting the indigenous people of Darfur. Last week, a UN-appointed commission lambasted the Sudanese authorities for gross human rights violations in Darfur. Washington, too, this week stepped up its campaign to brand Sudan as a state violating the human rights of its citizens. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan demanded that those responsible for human rights violations in Darfur be brought before the International Criminal Court. Washington, on the other hand, is pressing instead for the alleged perpetrators to be tried by a new African tribunal based in Arusha, Tanzania. The US warned the court could be used for politically motivated prosecutions of American troops abroad. Both Washington and Brussels have condemned ceasefire breeches and expressed serious reservations about the Sudanese government air raids on civilian targets in DAli Othman arfur. The commission noted that there were abductions, rape and other abuses. Sudan, in the meantime, insists on the trials being held on Sudanese soil. Sudanese Vice-President Ali Othman Mohamed Taha told a rally in the North Darfur capital of Al- Fasher that anyone found to have committed human rights- related crimes will be dealt with by Sudanese authorities. "What is being reported about a trial of some individuals or officials in courts outside the Sudan is something we will not accept as a government," Sudan's state-run news agency quoted Taha as saying. Taha and other Sudanese officials say such allegations infringe on the sovereignty of Sudan. But the Sudanese authorities officially declare they are bringing the perpetrators of human rights abuses in Darfur and other parts of Sudan to book. Sudan, however, insists that Sudanese courts alone should prosecute the perpetrators of human rights violations. The report submitted to the United Nations recommended that 51 Sudanese nationals -- including high-ranking government officials, rebels and ethnic Arabs who served in the militias better known as the Janjaweed -- stand trial at the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges related to the two-year Darfur conflict. The report also said government-backed militias were still involved in rape, mass killings and wanton destruction in Darfur, a region the size of France. The conflict has left at least 70,000 people dead and rendered more than two million homeless. Mohamed Fayeq, head of the Cairo-based Arab Human Rights Organisation, told Al-Ahram Weekly that there was no evidence of genocide in Darfur. Fayeq, however, conceded that there were instances of mass killings. "We found out that the Sudanese government did not embark on a campaign of genocide in Darfur. There was no intention at all to exterminate the indigenous population. When the civilian people of Darfur fled the fighting, they often took refuge in police stations and government-controlled shelters," he added. "Our mission was to find out whether these crimes amounted to genocide and to identify the perpetrators," Fayeq explained. He stressed that there was no Arab-African divide in the Darfur conflict. He said the commission was essentially a fact-finding mission that gathered information on suspected war criminals. Italian law professor Antonio Cassese, the chair of the panel that produced the Darfur report, said a sealed envelope containing 51 names of senior officials and members of the Sudanese armed and security forces and Janjaweed accused of serious war crimes has been sent to UN Secretary-General Annan. "We were very careful to hear all sides and read the various reports and jot down remarks," Fayeq told the Weekly. "Our commission was based in Geneva, Switzerland, but we visited Darfur and other parts of Sudan and we had a good team of professional international investigators. We gathered much information." In a separate but related development, the Sudanese government and the Darfur armed opposition groups will meet in Abuja next week for peace talks. Representatives from Libya, the United States, France and the European Union will attend the Abuja talks scheduled for 15-16 February. And, in an unprecedented development, John Garang, soon to be officially appointed first vice-president of Sudan, and currently the leader of the SPLA made a rare appearance at the UN. He was accompanied by Sudan's current First Vice- President Ali Othman Mohamed Taha. Together Taha and Garang pleaded with the UN Security Council on Tuesday to relinquish the idea of prosecuting alleged perpetrators of human rights violations as its first priority. "We are here to persuade Security Council members to see the wisdom and the rationale in bringing those accused to stand trial in Sudan," Taha told reporters in New York. "We strongly believe there are no grounds for taking suspects outside Sudan," he added. Sudanese government will neither send Sudanese citizens or officials suspected of committing war crimes in Darfur to any international court nor to the Arusha tribunal proposed by Washington, Sudan's vice-president stressed. Washington, however, has become more vocal in its criticism of Khartoum for too long. The European Union, too, condemned the heinous crimes in Darfur, but unlike America, Europe has stopped short of judging the Sudanese atrocities as genocide. Defence officials in the West say Sudan spends far more than it admits on its armed forces and allied militias such as the Janjaweed. The West has subjected Sudan to the most rigorous scrutiny so far. The United States has interests at stake. Sudan is a major prospective oil exporter, and American oil companies are raring at the chance to do business in Sudan. The Sudanese economy is in shambles. Growth petered out in the 1990s with the intensification of war in the south of the country, but the discovery of oil in commercial quantities promises to turn the Sudanese economy around. The Sudanese government is eager to move on from dealing with past excesses to kick-start the process of national reconstruction.
