U.N.: Strengthen Resolution on Darfur

[Darranar]

Your Excellency,

As the Security Council continues to discuss the desperate situation in Darfur, we wish to express our concerns on the latest draft resolution, circulated by the United States on July 27, 2004, and to share with you recent human rights information collected on the ground by our investigators.

We have been able to document, contrary to persistent denials by the Government of Sudan, that government-backed militias or auxiliary forces popularly known as the “Janjaweed” have not only been supported, but have been recruited, armed and deployed by the Sudanese government as part of its military strategy in Darfur. This strategy and policy of militia support is not only clearly delineated in government documents obtained by Human Rights Watch, but also by hundreds of testimonies collected from victims and witnesses of the joint-government and militia attacks. The atrocities committed by the militias are therefore ultimately the responsibility of the government, whose regular forces have also been implicated in numerous serious human rights crimes, including systematic indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Darfur.

Human Rights Watch has been investigating and reporting on human rights violations in Darfur through repeated visits to Darfur and to neighboring Chad. Based on information collected last month in Chad and this month in Darfur, we stress that—again, contrary to claims by the Government of Sudan—there is little indication of any real progress in the human rights situation over the past few months and weeks. While the patterns of violence and large-scale displacement have changed in some areas of Darfur—mainly because the campaign to cleanse large rural areas of the targeted population has by and large been accomplished—civilians who remain under government control continue to be subjected to systematic violence in a climate of total impunity and growing racial animus.

Human Rights Watch