UN chief protests Sudan arrests, beatings of staff
24 Jan 2007 22:29:00 GMT Source: Reuters
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U.N. special envoy for Darfur Jan Eliasson meets Africa Union staff members at their headquarters in Khartoum, January 11, 2007.
REUTERS/Mohamed Nureldin Abdalla
By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 24 (Reuters) - Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon protested the arrests and beatings of U.N. and other relief staff in Darfur, a U.N. spokesman said on Wednesday, days before talks with Sudan on a beefed-up peacekeeping force.
Ban criticized the arrests as well as the recent Sudanese bombardment of Darfur towns to Mutrif Siddig, Khartoum's visiting undersecretary in the Foreign Affairs Ministry, on Tuesday before leaving for Europe and an African Union meeting on a long-delayed U.N. peacekeeping mission for Darfur.
It was Ban's first public comment since Darfur police and security officials on Friday arrested 20 U.N., African Union and other aid workers at a social gathering in Nyala.
Five U.N. staff members were beaten with rifles and one accused police of sexually assaulting her.
"The secretary-general is extremely concerned about the arrest" of the 20 relief workers and "expects a swift investigation of this incident, particularly as several of the staff were assaulted and seriously injured before they were released," U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said.
Ban also was "deeply disturbed" by aerial bombardments in North Darfur and "alarmed by reports of many civilian casualties," Haq said. The African Union, which has some 7,000 soldiers and monitors in Darfur has confirmed rebel reports that the government bombarded their positions in Anka and Korma on Jan. 16 and 19.
More than 200,000 people are estimated to have died and 2.5 million forced from their homes in four years of rape, pillage and murder in Darfur, violence Washington calls genocide.
ONLY BANGLADESH VOLUNTEERS
Ban is headed to Addis Ababa for an African Union meeting on Monday and Tuesday, where he will also meet Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who is wavering on how many troops could be included in a "hybrid" AU-UN operation in Darfur.
But the United Nations has problems too in finding enough troops. The world body has gone ahead with the first phase of an agreed package that provides the under-equipped AU with about 140 military officers and police, 36 armored personnel carriers and night goggles.
But a second, larger support package that could include several hundred U.N. military, police and civilian personnel and aircraft, has only drawn volunteers from Bangladesh.
The third phase is to be the hybrid force that the United Nations hopes will have some 17,000 soldiers.
Jean-Marie Guehenno, the head of U.N. peacekeeping, said the African Union and the United Nations were working on a common position they would present to Sudan so that details would not be referred to another study group in Addis Ababa.
"Hopefully then we would get good push from AU leaders, he told two reporters.
Among the issues that have to be decided are troop numbers for the "hybrid" operation, its commander, to where the commander reports, the mandate of the force and who assembles the force, diplomats said.
Until that is determined, U.N. officials, who are also looking at a smaller operation in neighboring Chad, cannot ask the General Assembly for funding.
Ban's seven-nation trip began at European Union and NATO offices in Brussels on Wednesday, after which he attends a donor's conference in Paris on reconstruction aid for Lebanon.
On Friday, he goes to Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the United Nations has 17,000 peacekeepers, and two days later to Ethiopia for the African Union conference. He goes to Nairobi on Jan. 31 and a day later to The Hague to visit the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia.
