From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Sat Jan 30 2010 - 08:01:14 EST
Sudan rejects US charge on arms transfers to south
Sat Jan 30, 2010 8:00am GMT
By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Sudan's U.N. ambassador on Friday dismissed as
"irresponsible" U.S. allegations that weapons from northern Sudan were going
to armed groups in the semi-autonomous south ahead of a nationwide April
election.
Earlier this week the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice,
said Washington was concerned about the flow of arms, including heavy
weapons, into southern Sudan, and believed they were coming from northern
Sudan and neighboring countries.
Sudanese Ambassador Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem told Reuters that Khartoum
"categorically denied" Rice's allegations.
"The statement by the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. attributing arms flows to
south Sudan to the north is most irresponsible," he said in an interview.
"It demonstrates that Susan Rice is still imprisoning herself in the past
and failed to move from an activist position to that of a worthy
representative of a superpower."
He added that it was U.S. arms sales that were making the world less safe,
not weapons from his oil-rich African nation.
U.N. officials have said privately that they, too, suspect the north was
supplying southern militants with weapons.
The oil-producing nation's north and south fought each other for more than
two decades until a 2005 peace deal that promised national elections, due in
April, and a referendum on southern independence in January 2011.
The International Crisis Group (ICG), an independent multinational group,
has said relations between the two sides have broken down and Sudan needed
more time to prepare for a widely expected 'yes' vote for southern
independence if it wanted to avoid a violent break-up.
Armies from both sides, and an array of rebel groups and militias, are also
stockpiling arms ahead of any conflict, despite U.N. and European Union arms
embargoes, according to a December 2009 report by the Small Arms Survey.
The Enough Project, a U.S.-based anti-genocide group, has been saying for
months that increasingly sophisticated attacks by the same ethnic-based
militias that were used by Khartoum in the south during the civil war was
cause for great alarm.
EUROPE'S GUANTANAMO
The Sudanese envoy also reacted angrily to comments from the chief
prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague, Luis
Moreno-Ocampo, who said this week that he expected a genocide charge soon
against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
Abdalhaleem said that "the enemies of Sudan" were trying to use
Moreno-Ocampo to destroy the peace process for Sudan's western Darfur region
and insisted that Khartoum would never cooperate with The Hague-based court.
He said Moreno-Ocampo was "just a screwdriver in the workshop of double
standards and injustice and the ICC is the European Guantanamo." He was
referring to the controversial U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba.
The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Bashir in March 2009 for alleged war
crimes in Sudan's western Darfur region in connection with mass killings and
deportations, but it said there were insufficient grounds to charge him with
genocide.
Moreno-Ocampo appealed that decision to press for a genocide indictment.
The ICC has said it will issue a decision on the appeal on February 3.
Bashir described the warrant against him as "all lies" last year and ordered
major aid agencies out of Sudan in response.
Estimates vary widely on how many people have died in the Darfur conflict,
which began when mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms against the government
in 2003. The United Nations says as many as 300,000 have died, but Sudan's
estimate is 10,000.
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