KHARTOUM, 2 April 2004 — Sudanese authorities charged Islamist leader Hassan Turabi with damaging the country’s security and closed down his party’s offices yesterday, officials and newspapers said. The head of Turabi’s offices, Awad Babikir, told AFP that police shut the headquarters of his Popular Congress party in Khartoum as well as most of its branches across Sudan. At least one party activist was arrested yesterday, bringing to 14 the number of PC members known to have been arrested in three days.
Interior Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Husseinin told the independent Al-Sahafa daily that Turabi would stand trial on charges of “instigating tribal and regional sedition and harming security.”
Under Sudan’s penal code, Turabi, 72, who was arrested at his home early Wednesday, could face up to 10 years in jail if convicted. A former leading light of President Omar Bashir’s regime, Turabi was freed in October 2003 after spending nearly three years under house arrest. Husseinin played down the controversy stirred by the arrest of Turabi and army officers thought to belong to his PC. “This does not impair the stability of the country,” he insisted.
Information Minister Al-Zahaw Ibrahim Malik said Wednesday that Turabi was arrested for making statements in which he “incited regionalist and tribalist tendencies” against the government.
The move followed the arrest Sunday of a number of army officers on suspicion of involvement in a military coup attempt apparently related to the ongoing conflict in the western Darfur region.
Meanwhile, a UN official said yesterday widespread atrocities in Darfur are jeopardizing aid for several hundred thousand people who have been systematically forced out of their homes by government-backed militia. “The situation is extremely serious because of widespread atrocities and other grave human rights abuses against the civilian population,” UN emergency relief officer Daniel Augstburger told reporters after returning from a mission to the area.
“There is a systematic removal of populations of non-Arab origin by the government in order to push them into various camps for displaced people.” “This is Muslim against Muslim,” he added. The United Nations said it was allowed to help some displaced people who have gathered in clusters in and around the three major cities in Darfur, but it has been stopped from moving away from main roads and cities.
Augstburger said that during the mission from February 12 to March 26 “we witnessed rape, gang rape, systematic looting, destruction of villages and a policy which forces this population to move out”.
“We were allowed to move to some areas where we systematically witnessed some villages being burned, even when we go there ourselves,” he added. UN aid was not enough to satisfy the needs of the displaced in Darfur, and only a political intervention could help them, the official said.
Aid also jeopardized the recipients because nomadic militia recruited by Sudan’s government then attacked them to seize supplies. “The human rights situation... is such a serious issue that it even brings into question the whole of the humanitarian operation,” Augstburger added.
