SUDAN

Human Rights Developments

The human rights tragedy of Sudan, the largest country in Africa, continued in 1993.

The repressive government headed by Gen. Omer al Bashir and controlled by the National Islamic Front (NIF) continued to consolidate the power they seized through a military coup that in 1989 overthrew the elected government. Its radical agenda was to impose its version of Shari'a (Islamic) law and convert Sudan into a totalitarian Islamic state. Sudan's thirty million citizens would be ranked according to religion, sect, political affiliation and sex and granted or deprived of rights accordingly.

This discriminatory agenda completely failed to respect the diversity of Sudan's more than 600 ethnic groups. None is in the majority although those who call themselves Sudanese Arabs are over 40 percent, Dinka 11 percent, and Nuba 8 percent. Only 73 percent of the population is Sunni Muslim (most of them followers of Sufi sects), followed by traditional African religions (16 percent) and Christians (9 percent).

All institutions, from the army to the courts to the schools, have been steadily purged of independent civil servants and staffed by NIF party loyalists, and all forms of civil liberties have been suppressed. Political parties are banned, religious intolerance is the order of the day, and arbitrary arrests and torture prevail.

More than twenty people were detained in April 1993 in connection with an alleged coup attempt. Some of these detainees were paraded on public television, chained and bearing signs of ill-treatment. Reports indicated that the accused were severely tortured. The government announced that they would have a fair and open trial, but no trial had yet taken place as of November.

A campaign against Islamic groups other than the NIF was carried out in mid-1993. The two largest political parties in pre-coup Sudan had roots in the traditional Islamic sects of Al-Khatmiya and Al-Ansar. The government confiscated an important mosque in Khartoum North belonging to Al-Khatmiya in late May, 1993. On May 22, 1993, police troops took control of the Omdurman religious complex of the tomb of Muhammad Ahmed Al-mahdi, the most important shrine of the Al-Ansar sect, evacuating the buildings and confiscating the furniture. Many members of the Al-Ansar sect were arrested. Sheikh Al-Hadiya, the leader of Ansar Al-Suna Al-Muhammadiya, was arrested in June 1993.

The armed opposition, represented by two factions of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), had a poor human rights record in the areas of south Sudan it controlled. The two factions were the SPLA-Torit faction headed by John Garang and the 1991 breakaway SPLA-Nasir/United faction led by Riak Machar.

The ten-year-old conflict in the south continued to bring famine, pestilence and death to the 3.5 million people who lived in that region. The violations of the rules of war committed by the government and the SPLA factions were a direct and important cause of food shortages and deaths.

South Sudan had, at best, only a subsistence economy intermittently disrupted by floods, droughts and disease. The precarious balance with theenvironment in which its people lived has been upset by war. Civilians have had difficulty planting and harvesting because they have been, more than once, displaced by the conflict. Fighting also impeded their search for work or food, and seasonal migration with their cattle. Armies engaged in burning villages and widespread looting of cattle, thus depriving civilians of another means of coping with grain shortages and rendering them vulnerable to disease and death.

Pockets of famine continued to exist in south Sudan, as they had throughout the decade of war. They shifted according to battle lines. In three southern areas of food shortages surveyed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in March 1993 (Ame, a displaced persons camp, Ayod and Kongor), half the deaths in the preceding twelve months were attributed to starvation, with diarrhoeal disease the second most frequent cause of death. The team found that the rates of severe under-nutrition were "among the highest ever documented," including in Somalia.

The U.N. estimated that approximately 800,000 people were in need of international food relief while another 700,000 need such non-food assistance as seeds, farming tools, fishing implements, and mosquito nets. Such implements, lost or destroyed in the war, are needed to restore self-sufficiency and reduce dependency on expensive imported food.

Not only personal tools but most infrastructure, electricity and communications had been destroyed during the war. The few roads were impassable during the rainy season, sprinkled with landmines and targets for ambush at all times. Commerce was reduced to barter in most areas. The rebel-controlled countryside and the government-controlled towns did not trade with each other; the government towns were besieged garrisons surviving on relief food, captive markets for army profiteering.

Included in the civilians dependent on relief food were some 250,000 residents of Juba, under SPLA-Torit siege for years. SPLA-Torit had indiscriminately shelled the government-held town, which continued to be ringed by landmines laid by both sides. The government prohibited movement out of the town, while engaging in iron-fisted repression of civil society and non-Muslims.

Indiscriminate government aerial bombardment produced hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and refugees during the year. Early in 1993, the government bombed the towns of Kayo Keiji, Mundri, Lotukei and Chikudum, causing numerous civilian victims. But the most damage was done in August by indiscriminate government bombing preceding a major military offensive in Western Equatoria, generating over 100,000 new Equatorian refugees who fled into Uganda; tens of thousands of already displaced Dinkas fled further north into Sudan.

The devastating impact of the prolonged war was illustrated by the decline in population for the three southern provinces from 5.2 million in the 1983 census to a U.N. estimate of 3.5 million in 1993. The U.S. Committee for Refugees estimated that in ten years of war 1.3 million people, southerners, had died because of the conflict.

Despite the shocking need for all kinds of assistance to the southern population, the government continued callously to obstruct relief efforts, as part of its strategy of punishing civilians living in rebel areas and strangling rebel forces. It permitted the U.N.'s relief effort, Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), to reach only six locations in south Sudan in 1992. In December 1992, however, the government was temporarily shocked into facilitating delivery of humanitarian relief by an avalanche of international pressure and the sudden appearance of nearly 30,000 U.S. troops under the U.N. flag to protect delivery of humanitarian assistance in nearby Somalia that month. OLS then was permitted to expand its deliveries to forty locations in south Sudan in 1993, but constant struggle is required to maintain the assistance. In mid-1993 the government refused entry to the Special Envoy for Humanitarian Affairs for the Sudan appointed by the U.N. Secretary-General, and only relented under pressure.

In May 1993, the government finally permitted the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to resume its operations in south Sudan. The ICRC's expulsion in March 1992 had put a halt to its work in the protection of war victims, particularly minors, and in visiting persons detained on account of the conflict.

The ferocity of the attacks on civilians had been heightened since 1991 by tribal revenge-taking between the Dinka aligned with SPLA-Torit and their traditional Nilotic cousins and rivals, the Nuer, aligned with SPLA-Nasir/United. In 1993, Equatorian tribes were increasingly affected.

Three Didinga villages near Chikudum in Eastern Equatoria were burned by SPLA-Torit troops in early 1993 for allegedly siding with the other faction. Several Didinga men were summarily executed after capture by SPLA-Torit. SPLA-Torit looted and burned the seven Pari villages of Lafon in Eastern Equatoria to the ground after occupying it in early 1993, causing many civilian deaths and displacing thousands. In both locations, civilians complained of SPLA-Torit's confiscation of their food.

A pocket of famine dubbed the "hunger triangle" was created by factional fighting in 1993 along the Nuer-Dinka territorial divide in Upper Nile, including the towns of Ayod, Waat, and Kongor.

The SPLA-Nasir faction occupied Kongor, where Dinka civilians complained of mistreatment, including killings, beatings and theft of food, by those forces. The SPLA-Nasir faction convened a meeting there to unite all SPLA dissidents, but the meeting was attacked by SPLA-Torit on March 27. The most prominent victim was an elder Equatorian statesman, Joseph Oduho, who had been released from long-term detention by SPLA-Torit in 1992. An expatriate U.N. World Food Program monitor was brutalized in the March 27 attack, forced to strip naked and walk through thorns, shot at eight times and left for dead. (In 1992, two U.N. relief workers were killed while in SPLA-Torit custody.)

Following the attack on Kongor, the SPLA-Torit forces swept north into Ayod and Yuai in Upper Nile in April, burning those two Nuer population centers to the ground, destroying the U.N. compounds, looting cattle, and causing heavy civilian casualties. They continued to justify these actions as retaliation for the Nasir faction's massacre of several thousand Bor Dinka in late 1991.

On May 28 the U.S. brokered a cease-fire and agreement to military withdrawal between the SPLA factions in the "hunger triangle." The cease-fire was broken in June. Although it is not clear which side struck first, both parties advanced on the territory of the other, killing civilians and burning villages. SPLA-Nasir/United manipulated relief food for military purposes. Recognizing that relief agencies would attempt to deliver food to the starving, and that the hungry would walk for days to reach a food source, the faction summoned desperate civilians to Yuai in the "hunger triangle" in early 1993, creating a town of thousands where fewer than one hundred had lived. Relief food followed, from which the new Yuai base, close to the Dinka/Nuer front line, could be illegally provisioned. Yuai was attacked in April and June and burned down by the SPLA-Torit faction, which killed scores of civilians.

In late July, the Nasir faction attacked Kongor, making it the sixth attack on the town in the last two years.

In late July, the government started an offensive from the garrison town of Yei into Kaya in Western Equatoria. The government's heavy indiscriminate bombardment of SPLA-held towns and villages resulted in a flow of 106,000 Equatorian refugees into nearby Uganda in less than four weeks, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The economy was severely disrupted, and the towns of Kaya and Yondu deserted and looted. Relief officials predicted that several hundred thousand more were at risk of starvation.

Finally, in the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan, the "transition zone" north of the three southern provinces, the government army continued its counterinsurgency campaign: forced relocation of villagers and burning of their villages, forcible conscription, and killing of resistors. Nubans are non-Arab tribesmen of Muslim, Christian and animist faiths. The government armed and used tribal Arab militias (murahaleen) to raid the Nuba population with impunity. The murahaleen were then transformed into the Popular Defense Force (PDF).

The relocated were sent outside of the Nuba Mountains, although some were returned to work on "peace villages" serving as labor pools for large agricultural estates. Much of the Nuba civic urban leadership was eliminated through arrest and disappearance.

Despite reports of severe rural deprivation caused by the counterinsurgency campaign, the government adamantly refused permission for the U.N. or foreign agencies to bring assistance to non-government-controlled areas of the Nuba Mountains. The cruelty of this policy was reinforced by food shortages due to drought and locusts.

The government continued to subject southern and other displaced persons who fled north to Khartoum and other cities to discrimination and harassment. As of November, about 150,000 displaced persons remained outside Khartoum proper in unsuitable sites called "peace camps," far from any jobpossibilities; some 700,000 squatters and displaced had been forcibly relocated to these sites starting in early 1992, their possessions were destroyed in transit. Relief and development assistance by international nongovernmental organizations was severely restricted by government obstructionism, while access was wide open to Islamic agencies which used relief to proselytize.

The Right to Monitor

The Sudan Human Rights Organization (SHRO) was still banned in Sudan in 1993. The government's human rights organization, of the same name, served solely to defend the government from criticism of its human rights record. The original SHRO was re-launched in the United Kingdom in January 1992, and during 1993 was active in the U.K., Egypt, the Netherlands, former Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Canada, Sweden and the U.S.

Typical of the government campaign to close down civil society and block human rights monitoring was the destruction of the independence of the legal profession; attorneys had used the courts to fight human rights abuses. The Sudan Bar Association was banned on June 30, 1989 and replaced in September 1989 by a government-appointed "steering committee" for the Bar Association. This committee defended the government's abuses. A presidential decree of January 1993, amending the Advocate's Act of 1983, in effect put the bar association under the jurisdiction of the general law of trade unions (1992 Trade Unions Act). The legal profession thus fell under the supervision, for the first time in Sudan's history, of a nonjudicial government official, the Registrar of Trade Unions.

Government supporters then created the General Union of Sudanese Lawyers (GUSL) to serve as a new Bar Association. They approached the Registrar of Trade Unions to call an election of officers for their organization. Obliging them and guaranteeing their electoral victory, the registrar called an election among attorneys on one day's notice in March 1993.

An Africa Watch researcger was extended a visa by the Sudan government to conduct a human rights fact-finding mission in mid-June. At the last minute, the government asked for a postponement of the visit until mid-July. In July, also at the last minute, the government reneged on that invitation. It has since abstained from contact with Africa Watch while maintaining a public posture of "openness" to foreign human rights visitors and others.

U.S. Policy

The U.S. condemned human rights violations by both the government and the SPLA factions. In its February 1993 annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (covering 1992), the U.S. State Department harshly and extensively criticized the human rights record of the Sudan government for total lack of political freedom, due process and civil liberties. It also criticized the government for extrajudicial executions and disappearances, and noted that "torture and other forms of physical mistreatment by official and unofficial security forces were widespread in 1992." The State Department also concluded that "the SPLA ultimately ruled by summary methods that included beatings, torture, and arbitrary execution." It also noted that SPLA shelling of Juba killed over 200 civilians.

Then on March 10, Assistant Secretary of State Herman J. Cohen condemned government bombing of rebel-held towns and rebel looting of relief deliveries. He reiterated U.S. shock and outrage over the government's execution of two employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Juba in August 1992. Secretary Cohen listed as principal human rights concerns the forced removal of Khartoum's squatter populations, forced relocations and abuses against Nubans, infringement of women's rights, arbitrary detention, torture, repression of the press, restrictions on labor unions, and coercive Islamization.

On May 4, newly-appointed Assistant Secretary of State George E. Moose reiterated these concerns and added concern about massacres, kidnapping, forced labor, child conscription, forced displacement and Arabization in the transition zone between north and south.

In public testimony, in contrast with the Country Reports, little mention was made of human rights abuses by the SPLA factions. This criticism was couched in terms of "intra-SPLA fighting" that shut down relief operations and demonstrated the rebel leaders' lack of regard for their own people's welfare.

To further publicize abuses in the government-controlled areas, in May 1993 the State Department (at the request of Cong. Frank Wolf) declassifieda cable from the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum describing widespread human rights abuses in Bahr El Ghazal and the Nuba Mountains. Since access to those areas was so limited, publication of this information played an important human rights role.

U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Donald Petterson visited both government- and SPLA-controlled areas of Sudan and brokered a cease-fire agreement whereby the two SPLA factions agreed as of May 28 to withdraw their troops from a famine-afflicted zone in south Sudan, in order to facilitate delivery of much-needed relief. But the cease-fire held only a few weeks.

In August 1993, the State Department designated Sudan a state sponsor of international terrorism under the Export Administration Act, as a result of the department's conclusion that Sudan allowed the use of its territory (including safe houses and training) by terrorists such as members of the Abu Nidal Organization, Hizballah and Palestine Islamic Jihad. The bombing at the World Trade Center in New York in early 1993 contributed to the downward spiral in U.S.-Sudan relations when it was discovered that some of the accused had Sudanese passports.

As a result of that terrorist listing, Sudan became ineligible for non-emergency assistance, certain benefits under the Trade Act, U.S. foreign tax credits, commercial sales of U.S. munitions, and other items. The U.S. also was required to vote against loans in international financial institutions and other uses of funds for Sudan.

Before being placed on the terrorist list, however, Sudan was already barred from economic or military aid by the Brooke Amendment, which prohibits countries in arrears on loan payments to the U.S. from receiving economic assistance, and Section 513 of the Foreign Assistance Act, which imposes the same prohibition on military rulers who have overthrown an elected government. The U.S. already routinely opposed development assistance to Sudan through the World Bank, and the State Department was hostile to Sudan's readmission to full membership in the International Monetary Fund.

Although development aid was prohibited by the terrorist listing, humanitarian assistance through voluntary agencies was not barred, and the U.S. was an important contributor to Operation Lifeline Sudan, the U.N. operation responsible for overseeing the delivery of assistance to 1.5 million Sudanese in need. In fiscal year 1993, the total U.S. government assistance to Sudan was over $85 million, most of it for emergency relief. From 1988 to mid-1993, the U.S. provided over $300 million in relief assistance to Sudan.

Sudan received increased attention in Congress concerning human rights and conflict resolution. Cong. Frank R. Wolf made his third visit to Sudan in February 1993, and denounced a government bombing of Kajo Keji, the aftermath of which he witnessed. He urged U.N. and U.S. pressure to stop government bombing and stem the flow of sophisticated military equipment.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing in May on Sudan, focusing on human rights issues and the nature of the conflict. The House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Africa, held hearings on Sudan in March and its chair, Harry Johnston, headed a congressional delegation to Sudan in July to raise human rights issues with all parties. The subcommittee co-sponsored a panel discussion by the parties in Washington on October 20 and 21, 1993.

That conference was followed by a breakthrough peace agreement dated October 22, 1993 between the two SPLA factions, facilitated by Representative Johnston and the State Department. Nowhere in the eight points of agreement, however, did the parties mention human rights or agree to cease their abusive treatment of the civilian population.

The Role of the United Nations

The U.N. increased its response to the human rights and humanitarian disaster in Sudan during 1993, but without including a human rights component in its relief operations. On December 18, 1992, the U.N. General Assembly had expressed "its deep concern at the serious human rights violations in the Sudan, including summary executions, detentions without due process, forced displacement of persons and torture." The General Assembly had called upon the government to ensure that all religious and ethnic minorities enjoy the rights recognized in the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and called upon all parties to the hostilities to fully respect international humanitarian law.

On March 10, 1993, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights appointed a Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Sudan, Gaspar Biro, who visited the country in September in preparation for a report to be delivered to theGeneral Assembly in November 1993. The extensive U.N. relief effort for the displaced in the south, however, has no full-time human rights or protection function, despite the massive abuses of humanitarian law that were the root cause of civilian suffering, famine and death. The needs of Sudan for constant human rights protection were so great that a Special Rapporteur in twice-yearly visits could never meet them. The crisis required a large team of U.N. human rights monitors stationed throughout Sudan, especially in the south and the Nuba Mountains, to promptly document and denounce violations of human rights and humanitarian law.

The Work of Africa Watch

Africa Watch issued a report on the persecution of the Coptic minority in Sudan in February 1993. It conducted two fact-finding missions to south Sudan and Nairobi, in March and for five weeks in June-July 1993; after each mission, a summary of concerns was issued on the war in south Sudan. A more comprehensive report was planned for early 1994.