U.N. mission urges charges in Darfur crisis

A high-level U.N. mission to Darfur reported Monday that the Sudanese government had orchestrated human rights crimes against its own people and urged that leaders of Sudan’s government and allied militias be charged with war crimes.

But the Sudanese government in Khartoum is successfully blocking United Nations attempts to stem the violence, organizing opposition to the mission’s report and stepping back from its agreement to accept a joint U.N.-African peacekeeping force in the region.

Sudan’s government “has manifestly failed to protect the population of Darfur from large-scale international crimes, and has itself orchestrated and participated in these crimes,” says the report by a team commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council in December.

The 35-page report adds that rebels “are also guilty of serious abuses of human rights” in the fighting with government forces and their allied militias. In four years of conflict, more than 200,000 villagers have died and more than 2.5 million have fled their homes, the U.N. says.

The Human Rights Council will consider adopting the report Friday, but Sudan’s allies are trying to thwart that from happening, human rights advocates say.

Khartoum had blocked the team, led by Nobel Peace laureate Jody Williams of the U.S., from visiting the war-torn western region, so the mission had to rely on interviews with refugees across the border in Chad. The conclusions, say opponents, are “compromised.”

The report recommends that officials from Sudan’s government and allied militias be tried for war crimes. The International Criminal Court has already named a militia leader and a state minister as suspects for allegedly working together to organize attacks against civilians.

Darfur is one of the top issues being discussed at the fledgling Human Rights Council, which is still trying to establish its credibility after previous sessions focused mainly on Israel and, critics say, ignored more serious human rights abusers.

The council replaced the largely discredited Human Rights Commission, which had been taken over by “arsonists rather than firefighters,” said Mark Lagon, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of State for international organizations. The United States chose to sit out the council’s first term, and last week announced that it would not seek a seat at the next election for council membership either, opting to promote human rights from the outside.

But the new group, now in its fourth session, is still struggling to confront violators, human rights advocates say. Meanwhile, Sudan is rallying allies to defend it from censure Friday.

“It is still unclear whether the council can take action to further the recommendations of the human rights mission,” said Peggy Hicks, the global advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, who is in Geneva for the council’s three-week session.

“There is debate about the conclusions because the mission wasn’t able to reach Darfur. But this report simply confirms what is well known and documented by other missions and investigations into what is happening in Darfur -- some of the most serious human abuses in the world.”

The report comes days after Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir rejected a plan for the U.N. to share control of a new peacekeeping force with the African Union, dashing hopes that troops could soon arrive to help protect civilians.

In a letter delivered Thursday to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Bashir insisted that the AU keep full command of a planned joint force of 22,000 to augment the overstretched 7,000 AU peacekeepers now in Darfur. The regulations of the United Nations mandate that the world body control the peacekeeping operations it funds.

British Ambassador to the U.N. Emyr Jones Parry said Bashir’s letter was an attempt to renegotiate a hard-won agreement to deploy the U.N. troops and foreshadowed months more of delay.

“It’s a major setback,” he said Monday.

U.S. and European diplomats with the U.N. Security Council have said it is time to impose sanctions on Sudan and its leaders for allowing the violence to continue. But veto-holding members China and Russia have resisted sanctions against Sudan, arguing the penalties would cause the African nation to break off the little cooperation it has offered the U.N., and strand the people of Darfur.

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maggie.farley@latimes.com