After weeks of delays because of Chinese objections, the UN Security Council on Friday received a report on violations of the arms embargo in Sudan’s western Darfur region that infuriated Beijing.
Austrian UN Ambassador Thomas Mayr-Harting told reporters he was passing the panel of experts’ report on compliance with the embargo to council members. A council diplomat later confirmed that the report had been sent out.
The confidential report, which Reuters has seen, said Khartoum committed multiple breaches of the embargo and China has done little to ensure its weaponry is not used in Darfur.
It describes how markings on most of the 18 types of bullet casings found at scenes of attacks against UN/African Union peacekeepers indicated they were manufactured in China. However, it did not say the Chinese government was necessarily to blame.
China had reacted angrily to the report and refused to allow the Security Council’s Sudan sanctions committee to formally pass it to council members so that they could consider taking action, envoys said. Sanctions committees work on the basis of consensus, which means each member has veto powers.
As a result, it sat in limbo on the committee for weeks before Mayr-Harting passed it to the 15-nation council.
Normally such reports are published on the website of the Sudan sanctions committee, which Mayr-Harting chairs. It is unclear whether the experts’ report will be made public.
Mayr-Harting said council members would have to decide whether or not to publish the report. Diplomats say China would prefer to keep it out of the public eye.
The Chinese delegation has publicly complained about the report, saying it had “serious concerns” about it. China blocked a similar report by a panel of experts on North Korea sanctions for six months before allowing it to reach council members earlier this week.
The attempt to prevent the reports’ transfer to the Security Council and release to the public, envoys said, was emblematic of China’s increasingly self-confident approach to international diplomacy as it seeks to protect states like North Korea and Sudan to which it has close ties.
It is not illegal to supply weapons to Khartoum, but states are required to have so-called “end-use” guarantees from the Sudanese government that the arms will not end up in Darfur. However, many weapons and much ammunition reaches Darfur regardless of such guarantees, the experts’ report says.
For this reason, the expert panel recommends expanding the 2005 arms embargo to include Khartoum, but diplomats say China would most likely use its veto power to block any such move.
The conflict in Darfur flared in 2003 when mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms against the government, accusing it of neglecting the region. Khartoum fought back, and the UN estimates up to 300,000 people died in the ensuing humanitarian crisis. Khartoum puts the death toll at 10,000.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency