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Sudan Rejects U.S. Terrorism Blacklist
KHARTOUM, May 2 (News Agencies) - The Sudanese government has rejected its inclusion on a U.S. list of alleged sponsors of terrorism, saying it neither supports terrorists nor provides a safe haven for them, newspapers said Wednesday.
Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Chul Deng told the independent al-Ayam daily that the U.S. report, published on Monday, was "incorrect" and U.S. officials should know this because Sudan has "cooperated" with them.
Sudan "does not support terrorism and does not offer a safe haven to terrorists as the U.S. report alleges," Deng added.
Deng acknowledged that Sudan "supports and sympathizes with causes of peoples," such as the Palestinians, but that "this should not be misunderstood."
The secretary general of the ruling National Congress party, Ibrahim Ahmed Omar, also denied Sudan had links to terrorists.
The report, he told Al-Khartoum daily, "depicted the vision of the previous U.S. administration" of president Bill Clinton.
"We look forward to a new vision by the present administration [of President George W. Bush] and we wish the several rounds of talks we held with it would remove the erroneous concepts about the rule in Sudan," Omar said.
Al-Khartoum also quoted an unnamed government official as saying the report failed "to reflect" the cooperation which he said Khartoum has given Washington ensuring there was no support here for terrorism.
The official also faulted the report for only "shyly" denouncing practices by the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) "in an attempt to display impartiality and transparency."
The SPLA has been waging an 18-year war against successive Arab and Muslim governments in Khartoum.
Sudan, whose current government seized power in 1989 in an Islamist-backed coup, was among seven countries on the U.S. State Department's annual list of sponsors of terrorism. The list, which has not changed since 1993, also included Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea and Cuba.
The United States broke off relations with Sudan in February 1996, accusing the state of sponsoring "Islamic terrorism", though Washington has renewed tenuous ties in the last year.
The U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions in April 1996 in response to Sudan's refusal to turn over suspects implicated in a failed 1995 assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia.
In 1998, U.S. cruise missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical factory near Khartoum, which Washington alleged was making chemical weapons for Osama bin Laden. The charge was firmly denied here, and evidence later proved the attack was unjustified.
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