Central Darfur displaced demo against chemical weapons, bombs

Hundreds of displaced living in the Hasahisa camp in Central Darfur demonstrated on Friday against the continued bombing and the alleged use of chemical weapons in the Jebel Marra mountain range.

“The demonstration started at 9 am,” a camp resident told Radio Dabanga.

“We walked around the camp, chanting slogans like “no to chemical weapons, no to aerial bombardments, and no to ethnic cleansing”.

The demonstrators called upon the UN and the Security Council to establish a committee to investigate the alleged use of chemical weapons in Darfur’s Jebel Marra and bring the perpetrators to justice.

On 29 September, Amnesty International released a report indicating that at least 30 likely chemical attacks have taken place in the Jebel Marra area since January this year. The attacks killed about 250 people, mostly children, Amnesty stated.

The report has sparked wide condemnation in Sudan and abroad. The rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) suspended “all political engagement” with the Sudanese government on peace negotiations about Darfur.

In Austria, the Netherlands, the USA, and the UK, people protested the alleged use of chemical weapons in Sudan’s conflict-torn western region.

Khartoum resolutely denies the allegations, and intends to counter the international uproar by filing a lawsuit against the international human rights watchdog.

Independent munitions experts have asserted that the ‘evidence’ cited in the Amnesty report could be the residue of conventional bombing, but as Sudan has thus far prohibited any formal investigation on the ground, there is no conclusive way of proving or disproving the allegations.