Darfur killings not genocide, says UN group

A special United Nations commission has decided that two years of violence in the western Sudan region of Darfur was not genocide but "crimes against humanity with ethnic dimensions", according to leaks of the report in the US. The commission, led by the Italian judge Antonio Cassese, documents breaches of international human rights law and other war crimes, and names individuals who may have acted with "genocidal intent". But it failed to find evidence that the government in Khartoum, widely accused of backing the militias, had a specific policy of exterminating a particular ethnic group, the Los Angeles Times reported. The report is to be made public this week, after it goes to the Security Council. But it could set off a new dispute between the US and its key allies. In September, the State Department said the murder of tens of thousands of people in Darfur, and the forced uprooting of 1.8 million more, did constitute genocide. It spoke of a pattern of targeted violence, co-ordinated by the government and committed by state-backed militias. Even more problematic however than semantics could be the report's leaked recommendation that war crimes and human rights violations should be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC), an institution backed by Europe and most African countries, but strenuously opposed by the US. As a result, the Bush administration is caught in a tug-of-war, between its desire to punish those responsible for what it has declared a genocide, and its dislike of the ICC, which it believes will turn into a vehicle for anti-Americanism, and politically motivated prosecutions of US troops and officials. [more]

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