Two top UN human rights officials on Thursday stopped short of classifying the situation in Sudan's western Darfur region as a genocide, but said that crimes against humanity and war crimes have "probably occurred on a large and systematic scale."
Moreover, the "climate of impunity" in the conflict-wracked region is such that "we have not turned the corner on preventing genocide from happening in the future, or even in the near future," UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Juan Mendez, told reporters after briefing the UN Security Council.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour presented council members with several recommendations, including the need to deploy international police to aid Sudanese police stationed at refugee camps in Darfur.
The deployment of Sudanese police, she said, has done little to restore the faith of the 1.2 million Sudanese displaced by the fighting in the region and is contributing to the "climate of impunity reigning in Darfur today."
"A mere increase in their numbers is unlikely to restore the lack of faith ... and overcome the sense of insecurity and fear that is prevalent" in the refugee camps, Arbour said.
"It would seem that the only way to reverse that lack of trust would be to accompany the Sudanese police force with an international component in the discharge of their work," she told reporters.
Her recommendations were presented ahead of a Security Council meeting later Thursday with the Sudanese foreign minister -- a meeting which he requested.
Arbour told the council that a key challenge confronting security and aid to the region is "an alarming disconnect between the [Sudanese] government's perception -- or at least its portrayal -- of what is happening in Darfur and the assessment of that situation by almost everyone else."
The government "continues to convey neither a sense of urgency nor an acknowledgment of the magnitude of the human rights crisis in Darfur," she said.
Arbour also highlighted other recommendations, which included boosting the international presence in Darfur and putting an end to the government practice of forcing refugees to return, especially as many of the areas have not yet been secured.
The council on Sept. 18 passed a resolution calling for an international commission to investigate claims of genocide in Darfur.
It also gave the thumbs-up for a significantly expanded African Union force in Darfur, and threatened sanctions against the Khartoum government if it doesn't act to rein in Arab militias blamed for killing over 50,000 people and forcing 1.2 million to flee their homes.
Last week, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who heads the African Union, said the 53-nation body can quickly mobilize up to 5,000 troops to help end the looting and killing in Darfur but it needs hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy the force.
Irish-language rap group Kneecap on Saturday gave an impassioned performance for tens of thousands of fans at the Glastonbury Festival despite criticism by British politicians and a terror charge for one of the trio. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, has been charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in November last year. The rapper, who was charged under the anglicized version of his name, Liam O’Hanna, is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August. “Glastonbury,
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the
FLYBY: The object, appears to be traveling more than 60 kilometers per second, meaning it is not bound by the sun’s orbit, astronomers studying 3I/Atlas said Astronomers on Wednesday confirmed the discovery of an interstellar object racing through the solar system — only the third-ever spotted, although scientists suspect many more might slip past unnoticed. The visitor from the stars, designated 3I/Atlas, is likely the largest yet detected, and has been classified as a comet, or cosmic snowball. “It looks kind of fuzzy,” said Peter Veres, an astronomer with the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which was responsible for the official confirmation. “It seems that there is some gas around it, and I think one or two telescopes reported a very short tail.” Originally known as A11pl3Z before
Police have found 381 corpses piled up in a private crematorium in northern Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, the local prosecutor’s office said on Sunday, attributing the grisly find to negligence. “Preliminarily, we have 381 bodies that were deposited irregularly in the crematorium, which were not cremated,” said Eloy Garcia, communications coordinator of the Chihuahua state prosecutor’s office. Garcia said the corpses were “stacked” in no apparent order in various rooms of the building where the crematorium operates. They were “just thrown like that, indiscriminately, one on top of the other, on the floor,” he said. All the bodies had been embalmed. Instead of
RSS