KHARTOUM, 30 March 2004 — Sudanese security forces have arrested 10 military officers who were plotting to overthrow the government, a high-ranking military official said yesterday. The official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters the officers were arrested on Sunday and were mostly from war-torn western Sudan. He said they all had sympathies to the opposition Popular Congress party, led by Islamist leader Hassan Al-Turabi.
“There are 10, all of officer rank, under the leadership of a colonel... It was an attempt at a coup d’etat,” the military official said, adding that the group had been caught meeting in a military headquarters in Khartoum.
Turabi denied his party was involved in a coup bid but said his sources had told him around 27 officers had been arrested. The opposition leader is a former ally of Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir, who seized power in a 1989 military coup.
An Interior Ministry official had no comment on the report. Amid rumors of arrests, local press sources said they had been told by security not to publish anything on the issue. The military official said nine officers were from Darfur in west Sudan where the government has been fighting rebels for more than a year. The government has said major conflict in the area is over, but witnesses say government planes have bombed the area in recent weeks.
“The fact that five of the officers implicated were from the air force has very far reaching consequences because of the government’s reliance on aerial bombardment in its war against the rebels in Darfur,” the military official said.
Turabi was detained in 2001 after a power struggle with Bashir and released from house arrest in October. He said while his Popular Congress party was not involved in any coup attempt he supported the charges by the western rebels who say their region has been neglected by the government.
“It’s not only a purge. It is going to be a charge of attempted coup d’etat,” he told Reuters by telephone in Cairo about those officers arrested. He also said the officers were from the Darfur region, nearby Kordofan and other areas.
In addition, Turabi said five senior members of his party had been detained yesterday, with the first arrests made in the early morning. But he said it was not clear whether they would be kept for questioning of a few hours or held longer. Another party official said a further seven activists had been arrested.
The questioning of Turabi’s deputy, Abdullah Hassan Ahmed, on Sunday evening had centered on the uprising, he said.
Meanwhile, talks between rebels from Darfur and the Khartoum government will begin today in the Chadian capital N’djamena, an adviser to Chadian President Idris Deby announced. “We think we will have enough time to reach a conclusion, unless there are last-minute problems, by Friday,” Allami Ahmat said yesterday.
The Darfur conflict erupted in February 2003 between the government and rebels, who complain their region is marginalized. More than 10,000 people have been killed in the fighting, and an estimated 670,000 have been forced from their homes.
The UN humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, Mukesh Kapila, earlier this month described the conflict as “the world’s greatest humanitarian and human rights catastrophe”.
Kapila said most of the atrocities were being carried out by militia groups fighting the Sudan Liberation Movement rebel movement. The conflict has intensified just as the Khartoum government and the country’s main rebel group, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, based in the oil-rich south of the country, are finalizing a deal to end Sudan’s wider civil war, which began in 1983.
A group of UN human rights experts has expressed concern over “systematic” human rights abuses in Darfur region and demanded punishment for those responsible for the violations.
“We are gravely concerned at the scale of reported human rights abuses and at the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Darfur, Sudan,” eight experts of the UN Commission on Human Rights said in a statement sent to AFP in Nairobi yesterday.
