Sudan
21.05.04
Urgent Interventions
Sudan: Open Letter to President Omar Hasan al-Bashir
Cairo-Geneva, 21 May 2004
President Omar Hasan al-Bashir
Khartoum, Sudan
Dear President al-Bashir:
The Coordination Office of the Habitat International Coalition’s Housing and Land Rights Network (HIC-HLRN) and the International Secretariat of the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) are deeply concerned by the ongoing situation in and around Sudan’s Darfur Province since February 2003, as well as its long-term consequences. Especially, we are concerned by the recent statements of Sudanese government officials, portraying the region as currently stable and suitable for displaced persons’ return. Meanwhile, the United Nations has updated estimates indicating that now more than two million people have been affected. The previous estimate of some 120,000 Darfur refugees currently in Chad has nearly doubled to 200,000, and there is no prospect of safety for the population to be resettled there.
On 17 May, your State Minister for Internal Affairs Ahmad Muhammad Harun asserted that stability in Darfur can now be “maintained” by increasing the number of police. Interior Minister Abd ul-Rahim Muhammad Husain minimized the catastrophe as having devolved into merely “looting of the possessions and wealth of civilians and highway banditry” by the rebels. By all reported evidence, the rebels are by far not the only source of suffering, massacres, spreading disease and massive displacement. Deflecting State responsibility, dismissing the gravity of the matter and dispatching more police in Darfur fall far short of the clearheaded, honest and responsible action urgently required of the Sudanese government. Its own constituents and neighbouring States are at the core of an ever-widening circle of parties affected by an absence of civilized conduct on all sides, most troublingly also from official quarters.
The refugees and displaced persons have affirmed their desire—and right—to return to what remains of their homes and properties; however, that return would only be rational if the government-recruited janjaweed mercenaries are disarmed and brought to justice. To call for the refugees and IDPs to return under present circumstances poses a lethal fate for the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa people recently expelled from their habitat. Not only are the very same armed soldiers and janjaweed still operating in Darfur, but Sudanese Arab families have reportedly already begun to colonise the depopulated indigenous villages and lands. This constitutes population transfer, long prohibited in international humanitarian law, and is a recipe for further conflict, deprivation and ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, reports indicate that Sudanese government officials and military personnel are threatening community leaders so that they lead the displaced people back into that unthinkable trap.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan also has echoed the logical prerequisite of disarming the janjaweed before any resolution of this human tragedy can be imagined. The text of the humanitarian ceasefire agreement reached in April between the government and the two rebel groups in Darfur provides that Khartoum "shall commit itself to neutralise the armed militias." That essential step is already overdue, but especially urgent now, just weeks in advance of the coming rains, which will make the currently underfunded and insufficient relief efforts impossible, because the only access will be by airlift, for which facilities and funds are presently inadequate.
The dispossession and destruction campaign against the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa peoples massively violates their human right to adequate housing; i.e., the right of all women, men and children to gain and sustain a secure place to live in peace and dignity. House and village demolitions represent a gross human rights violation and a breach of international human rights and humanitarian norms, especially provisions regulating adequacy, nondiscrimination and military necessity. Thus, authorities continue especially to violate the peoples’ entitlements to security of tenure; livelihood; freedom from dispossession; participation and self-expression; physical security; and adequate compensation for violations and losses. All are core elements of the human right to adequate housing as recognized in international law. The government has not begun to provide adequate alternate housing or restitution for the victims. Sudan holds a treaty-bound obligation under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) to respect, defend, promote and fulfil these entitlements in an environment of self-determination, nondiscrimination, gender equality, rule of law, international cooperation, and nonregressivity.
Specifically, the Sudanese authorities have breached the State’s treaty obligations under the ICESCR, which Sudan ratified on 18 June 1986. The State has been derelict in its duties as elaborated in the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights General Comments Nos. 4 and 7 on the human right to adequate housing, including protection from forced eviction. In 2000, the treaty body overseeing that Covenant already warned the Government of Sudan against its “bombardment of villages and camps of the civilian population, in the war zones in southern Sudan” and the use of food as a weapon resulting in “man-made famine.” The Committee had urged the State party, in 2000, “to address the root causes of the problem of internally displaced persons and, in the short and medium term, to cooperate fully with international and nongovernmental organizations in the field, in order to provide for adequate (interim) measures ensuring the basic needs, such as adequate basic shelter,” etc.
Reports also document indiscriminate killing of civilians, mass rape of refugee and internally displaced women by the janjaweed, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances of civilians. These acts constitute serious violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including Article 6 (right to life), 7 (right against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment) and 9 (right against arbitrary arrest and detention).
In 2001, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), further reiterated its continuing “deep concern,” since 1994, ”over the large number of Sudanese who have become homeless as a result of the continuing conflict [between north and south] and who remain either internally displaced or as refugees living outside the country,” a situation that the Committee had referred to as "a vast programme of ethnic cleansing." Through its early-warning procedure, already in 1999, CERD raised alarm about Sudan’s similar practices in Darfur. It urged the Sudanese government “to uphold the fundamental economic and social rights” of non-Arab communities, “including the right to personal security, to housing, to food, and to just compensation for property confiscated for public use.” Also in 2001, CERD repeated its guidance that Sudan “implement the right to free return of all displaced persons to their homes of origin under conditions of safety.” In 2002, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child cited Sudan’s practice of “forced displacement of families, including children,” whereas “government forces have conducted indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas, including of food stocks.” Finally, it is necessary to note that the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines both “population transfer” (art. 7(1)(d) and 7(2)(d)) and the “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” (art. 8, 2.a (iv)) as war crimes. The failure to heed such a series of lawful guideposts and the perpetuation of impunity for crimes against Sudanese citizens in Darfur fall squarely within the authority, competence and obligations of the Sudanese State and its government.
The past and current events in Darfur’s deprivation demonstrate how vitally important the human right to adequate housing and land is to upholding human dignity, as well as the integrity of persons and the State. The scale of housing rights violations accumulating in Darfur threatens the very survival of entire communities. The trampling of these rights plainly has persisted deliberately and over time, despite legal guidance, international assistance and ample warnings from the human rights and humanitarian relief communities. However, Sudanese officials should not squander the present opportunity to avoid also the foreseeable and avoidable disaster.
In Darfur, this year’s agricultural harvest is now wasted and next year’s crop likely will not be planted. The rehabilitation and sustainability of survivors begs a comprehensive program to restore all rights and adequate livelihoods—especially land—to the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa victims within government obligations to dedicate “the maximum of its available resources” toward their redevelopment. Instead, current observations from the field indicate that janjaweed mercenaries under Sudanese army supervision have attacked and looted relief facilities (e.g., a UN World Food Programme relief truck on the Zalangei-Mornei road last Wednesday) and that government-supported janjaweed are now attacking and robbing those displaced Furs, Masalits, and Zaghawas who have taken international relief assistance.
In promoting the janjaweed ostensibly against rebels, Sudan’s government evades the root causes of Darfur’s discontent, which arises in large part from Khartoum’s long-standing neglect of the region and its citizens. At the popular level, murder, rape, dispossession, mass eviction and other terror tactics have transformed fellow citizens, previously bound by faith, social ties and a common poverty, into adversaries in ethnic hatred, fear and certain revenge that is bound to linger for generations. Immediate disarmament of the janjaweed mercenaries is an urgent priority to help defuse this cycle.
The waves of dispossessed and displaced humanity from Darfur include a large proportion of women and children with special needs. This demographic fact arises, at least in part, from the janjaweed and army massacres of untold numbers of Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa men. This scenario makes academic any attempt to assess human suffering in relative terms; however, among the survivors, women and children typically bear a disproportionate burden. HIC-HLRN and OMCT have receive reports from refugee camps with large proportions of children whose parents have both been killed at the hands of government forces and their agents. Even in the best-case postconflict scenario, the absence of male counterparts deepens the psychological suffering and travail for the widows and their community, but also requires special remedies, inter alia, to guarantee secure land-tenure rights for village women in the event of their safe return.
We remain seized with the grievous situation in Darfur, as in the other war-torn areas in Sudan, and the culture of impunity that has made it possible. As a matter of urgency, we ask that you and your government honestly and diligently cease and reverse support for the senseless injury to the citizens of Sudan, in particular the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa peoples. One essential and urgent forward step yet untaken is the immediate and complete disarmament of the janjaweed and the rehabilitation of the indigenous communities of Darfur with government protection and aid. However, failure now to take these minimal actions may ensure that Sudanese suffering will only grow with time, and cast further doubt on the future of Sudan itself.
We thank you in advance for your careful consideration of this grave and urgent matter, and we trust that these observations are helpful to your difficult decision making. We also look forward to receiving information that the Government of Sudan has responded to the crisis with a priority to these essential disarmament and protection measures toward rehabilitation of, and justice for the victims.
Please be assured of our highest consideration,
Joseph Schechla
Housing & Land Rights Network,Habitat International Coalition (HIC-HLRN)
Eric Sottas
World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT)
please click here for additional background information
President Omar Hasan al-Bashir
Khartoum, Sudan
Dear President al-Bashir:
The Coordination Office of the Habitat International Coalition’s Housing and Land Rights Network (HIC-HLRN) and the International Secretariat of the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) are deeply concerned by the ongoing situation in and around Sudan’s Darfur Province since February 2003, as well as its long-term consequences. Especially, we are concerned by the recent statements of Sudanese government officials, portraying the region as currently stable and suitable for displaced persons’ return. Meanwhile, the United Nations has updated estimates indicating that now more than two million people have been affected. The previous estimate of some 120,000 Darfur refugees currently in Chad has nearly doubled to 200,000, and there is no prospect of safety for the population to be resettled there.
On 17 May, your State Minister for Internal Affairs Ahmad Muhammad Harun asserted that stability in Darfur can now be “maintained” by increasing the number of police. Interior Minister Abd ul-Rahim Muhammad Husain minimized the catastrophe as having devolved into merely “looting of the possessions and wealth of civilians and highway banditry” by the rebels. By all reported evidence, the rebels are by far not the only source of suffering, massacres, spreading disease and massive displacement. Deflecting State responsibility, dismissing the gravity of the matter and dispatching more police in Darfur fall far short of the clearheaded, honest and responsible action urgently required of the Sudanese government. Its own constituents and neighbouring States are at the core of an ever-widening circle of parties affected by an absence of civilized conduct on all sides, most troublingly also from official quarters.
The refugees and displaced persons have affirmed their desire—and right—to return to what remains of their homes and properties; however, that return would only be rational if the government-recruited janjaweed mercenaries are disarmed and brought to justice. To call for the refugees and IDPs to return under present circumstances poses a lethal fate for the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa people recently expelled from their habitat. Not only are the very same armed soldiers and janjaweed still operating in Darfur, but Sudanese Arab families have reportedly already begun to colonise the depopulated indigenous villages and lands. This constitutes population transfer, long prohibited in international humanitarian law, and is a recipe for further conflict, deprivation and ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, reports indicate that Sudanese government officials and military personnel are threatening community leaders so that they lead the displaced people back into that unthinkable trap.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan also has echoed the logical prerequisite of disarming the janjaweed before any resolution of this human tragedy can be imagined. The text of the humanitarian ceasefire agreement reached in April between the government and the two rebel groups in Darfur provides that Khartoum "shall commit itself to neutralise the armed militias." That essential step is already overdue, but especially urgent now, just weeks in advance of the coming rains, which will make the currently underfunded and insufficient relief efforts impossible, because the only access will be by airlift, for which facilities and funds are presently inadequate.
The dispossession and destruction campaign against the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa peoples massively violates their human right to adequate housing; i.e., the right of all women, men and children to gain and sustain a secure place to live in peace and dignity. House and village demolitions represent a gross human rights violation and a breach of international human rights and humanitarian norms, especially provisions regulating adequacy, nondiscrimination and military necessity. Thus, authorities continue especially to violate the peoples’ entitlements to security of tenure; livelihood; freedom from dispossession; participation and self-expression; physical security; and adequate compensation for violations and losses. All are core elements of the human right to adequate housing as recognized in international law. The government has not begun to provide adequate alternate housing or restitution for the victims. Sudan holds a treaty-bound obligation under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) to respect, defend, promote and fulfil these entitlements in an environment of self-determination, nondiscrimination, gender equality, rule of law, international cooperation, and nonregressivity.
Specifically, the Sudanese authorities have breached the State’s treaty obligations under the ICESCR, which Sudan ratified on 18 June 1986. The State has been derelict in its duties as elaborated in the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights General Comments Nos. 4 and 7 on the human right to adequate housing, including protection from forced eviction. In 2000, the treaty body overseeing that Covenant already warned the Government of Sudan against its “bombardment of villages and camps of the civilian population, in the war zones in southern Sudan” and the use of food as a weapon resulting in “man-made famine.” The Committee had urged the State party, in 2000, “to address the root causes of the problem of internally displaced persons and, in the short and medium term, to cooperate fully with international and nongovernmental organizations in the field, in order to provide for adequate (interim) measures ensuring the basic needs, such as adequate basic shelter,” etc.
Reports also document indiscriminate killing of civilians, mass rape of refugee and internally displaced women by the janjaweed, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances of civilians. These acts constitute serious violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including Article 6 (right to life), 7 (right against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment) and 9 (right against arbitrary arrest and detention).
In 2001, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), further reiterated its continuing “deep concern,” since 1994, ”over the large number of Sudanese who have become homeless as a result of the continuing conflict [between north and south] and who remain either internally displaced or as refugees living outside the country,” a situation that the Committee had referred to as "a vast programme of ethnic cleansing." Through its early-warning procedure, already in 1999, CERD raised alarm about Sudan’s similar practices in Darfur. It urged the Sudanese government “to uphold the fundamental economic and social rights” of non-Arab communities, “including the right to personal security, to housing, to food, and to just compensation for property confiscated for public use.” Also in 2001, CERD repeated its guidance that Sudan “implement the right to free return of all displaced persons to their homes of origin under conditions of safety.” In 2002, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child cited Sudan’s practice of “forced displacement of families, including children,” whereas “government forces have conducted indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas, including of food stocks.” Finally, it is necessary to note that the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines both “population transfer” (art. 7(1)(d) and 7(2)(d)) and the “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” (art. 8, 2.a (iv)) as war crimes. The failure to heed such a series of lawful guideposts and the perpetuation of impunity for crimes against Sudanese citizens in Darfur fall squarely within the authority, competence and obligations of the Sudanese State and its government.
The past and current events in Darfur’s deprivation demonstrate how vitally important the human right to adequate housing and land is to upholding human dignity, as well as the integrity of persons and the State. The scale of housing rights violations accumulating in Darfur threatens the very survival of entire communities. The trampling of these rights plainly has persisted deliberately and over time, despite legal guidance, international assistance and ample warnings from the human rights and humanitarian relief communities. However, Sudanese officials should not squander the present opportunity to avoid also the foreseeable and avoidable disaster.
In Darfur, this year’s agricultural harvest is now wasted and next year’s crop likely will not be planted. The rehabilitation and sustainability of survivors begs a comprehensive program to restore all rights and adequate livelihoods—especially land—to the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa victims within government obligations to dedicate “the maximum of its available resources” toward their redevelopment. Instead, current observations from the field indicate that janjaweed mercenaries under Sudanese army supervision have attacked and looted relief facilities (e.g., a UN World Food Programme relief truck on the Zalangei-Mornei road last Wednesday) and that government-supported janjaweed are now attacking and robbing those displaced Furs, Masalits, and Zaghawas who have taken international relief assistance.
In promoting the janjaweed ostensibly against rebels, Sudan’s government evades the root causes of Darfur’s discontent, which arises in large part from Khartoum’s long-standing neglect of the region and its citizens. At the popular level, murder, rape, dispossession, mass eviction and other terror tactics have transformed fellow citizens, previously bound by faith, social ties and a common poverty, into adversaries in ethnic hatred, fear and certain revenge that is bound to linger for generations. Immediate disarmament of the janjaweed mercenaries is an urgent priority to help defuse this cycle.
The waves of dispossessed and displaced humanity from Darfur include a large proportion of women and children with special needs. This demographic fact arises, at least in part, from the janjaweed and army massacres of untold numbers of Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa men. This scenario makes academic any attempt to assess human suffering in relative terms; however, among the survivors, women and children typically bear a disproportionate burden. HIC-HLRN and OMCT have receive reports from refugee camps with large proportions of children whose parents have both been killed at the hands of government forces and their agents. Even in the best-case postconflict scenario, the absence of male counterparts deepens the psychological suffering and travail for the widows and their community, but also requires special remedies, inter alia, to guarantee secure land-tenure rights for village women in the event of their safe return.
We remain seized with the grievous situation in Darfur, as in the other war-torn areas in Sudan, and the culture of impunity that has made it possible. As a matter of urgency, we ask that you and your government honestly and diligently cease and reverse support for the senseless injury to the citizens of Sudan, in particular the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa peoples. One essential and urgent forward step yet untaken is the immediate and complete disarmament of the janjaweed and the rehabilitation of the indigenous communities of Darfur with government protection and aid. However, failure now to take these minimal actions may ensure that Sudanese suffering will only grow with time, and cast further doubt on the future of Sudan itself.
We thank you in advance for your careful consideration of this grave and urgent matter, and we trust that these observations are helpful to your difficult decision making. We also look forward to receiving information that the Government of Sudan has responded to the crisis with a priority to these essential disarmament and protection measures toward rehabilitation of, and justice for the victims.
Please be assured of our highest consideration,
Joseph Schechla
Housing & Land Rights Network,Habitat International Coalition (HIC-HLRN)
Eric Sottas
World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT)
please click here for additional background information