RUMBEK, Sudan, 21 January 2005 — Dutch Development Cooperation Minister Agnes van Ardenne yesterday inaugurated the first Western liaison office in postwar southern Sudan to in Rumbek, the region’s provisional capital.
The brief ceremony saw the raising of the Dutch and British flags in front of the office building located near the town’s airstrip that will represent the interests of the two countries.
“We do have an embassy in Khartoum, but Khartoum is too far away and here in Rumbek it should be done,” van Ardenne told reporters. “The liaison office here will be strongly linked to our embassy in Khartoum and the British Embassy in Khartoum,” she added, saying the aim of having an office in the south was to ease contacts with the region’s new leaders. Van Ardenne was the most senior Western official to visit the war-ravaged town after Khartoum and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army signed a peace deal ending Africa’s longest conflict.
Meanwhile, an official Sudanese committee of inquiry has found that serious human rights abuses were committed in the troubled Darfur region but rejected claims of ethnic cleansing and systematic rape.
“Serious human rights violations took place in the three states of Darfur, in which all parties to the conflict were involved to varying degrees, thus leading to human suffering of the people of Darfur, causing internal displacement and people taking refuge in neighboring Chad,” the committee said.
The international community and human rights groups have long raised concerns about the situation in Darfur, where ethnic rebels have been fighting the Khartoum government and its allied militias since February 2003.
But the committee report unveiled Wednesday added: “What had happened in Darfur despite its graveness did not constitute a genocide crime. The commission has concluded that incidents of rape and sexual abuses took place in the various states of Darfur but it has not been proven to the commission that there was systematic and widespread abuse that would constitute a crime against humanity.”
An uprising launched by ethnic minority rebels in early 2003 prompted the government in Khartoum to launch a bloody crackdown by Arab militias that Washington has said amounted to genocide.
