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U.N. Envoy Briefed On Increase In Alleged Abuses In Sudan
KHARTOUM, March 11 (News Agencies) - Sudanese human rights activists said Sunday they briefed U.N. envoy Gerhart Baum on what they charged were increasing government abuses, including arbitrary detention and curbs on freedom of speech.
Sudanese Group for Human Rights (SGHR) chairman Ghazi Suleiman told news agencies that his group delivered many complaints during a meeting at his residence here Saturday night with Baum, a German lawyer who currently serving as the United Nations investigator on human rights.
Ghazi Suleiman, was detained for about two months without charge while Baum was appointed to the post following the resignation last year of Leonardo Franco, whose relations with the Sudanese government are strained after Khartoum charged that he was biased.
Franco said in a report last year to the U.N. Human Rights Commission that Khartoum allowed Arab tribesmen to seize civilians in the war-torn south and sell them as "slaves.''
Suleiman said they told the envoy about a different set human rights abuses, namely the "limited margin" of freedoms, "narrowed" further last December when amendments to the country's National Security Act were introduced allowing people to be detained indefinitely without charge and denied access to the courts.
The group also complained about the "notorious" Public Order Act under which he said special police arrest people for alleged indecent behavior and take them to tribunals where they are flogged, Suleiman said.
Trying to keep human rights high on the world's agenda on Sudan, the rights group said it protested to the investigator against a law barring women from working in restaurants and hotels. Suleiman described the law as a violation of a woman's right to work.
The investigator was told that Sudanese, who fled the 18-year war in the south, were now in northern refugees camps that suffer from a lack of essential services, including health care and education, Suleiman said.
The SGHR chief said Baum had promised to include in his report to the U.N. Human Rights Commission all remarks made by the group, including their calls for democracy and peace.
Suleiman added that Baum said he would pay another visit to Sudan next October.
Suleiman also said the justice ministry's undersecretary Ahmed al-Mufti, whom the SGHR invited to the meeting, defended the government's human rights policies.
Mufti was quoted as telling the investigator the country had begun "a democratic transformation," moving towards "constitutional legitimacy in the last 10 years," following the 1989 military coup that brought Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir to power.
The official also spoke of a wider margin of freedoms, citing the recent return of opposition leader Sadeq al-Mahdi from a self-imposed four-year exile. The U.N. human rights investigator is due to meet with a number of government officials as well as opposition figures during his four-day visit to Sudan, which finishes Tuesday.
Khartoum is on the U.S. sanctions list for its alleged violations of human rights. The United States is the biggest single aid donor to southern Sudan and has given about $1.5 billion to opposition-held areas in the past decade.
Sudan has come recently under the international spotlight as the world community became concerned over Khartoum's support for alleged anti-U.S. groups, coupled with anticipated steady growth of Sudanese oil exports.
Sudan states that Western countries use the human rights issue to pressure Sudan towards more Western-friendly positions.
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton froze Sudanese government assets in the United States and barred most U.S.-Sudanese trade and investments there.
News agencies reported that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, however, was taking a new line towards Sudan. He reportedly met Friday with senior State Department officials to talk about crafting a policy designed to end a war long accompanied by starvation, disease, and egregious human rights abuses by both sides in the Sudanese conflict.
"There is perhaps no greater tragedy on the face of the earth today than the tragedy that is unfolding in the Sudan,'' Powell told a congressional panel this week.
In office only five weeks, Powell said he set aside time to focus solely on Sudan to help him understand the complex mix of issues driving the conflict in Africa's largest country.
He promised that ending the war "will be a priority."
Opposition from the mainly Christian and animist south have been fighting for greater autonomy from the mainly Muslim north since 1983 in a conflict that has cost some two million lives, most of them civilians.
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