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US group says Sudan forces raze remote border town

16 October 2012 17:35 (UTC +04:00)

Bakuâ€”APA. Sudanese security forces burned and looted a village in the remote Nuba Mountains in May before returning to shell the settlement two months later, a U.S. monitoring group said Tuesday as it released satellite imagery and video footage of the attacks, APA reports quoting Associated Press.
The Satellite Sentinel Project, backed by actor and Sudan activist George Clooney, said the campaign by the Sudanese police force, military, and allied militias on the village of Gardud al Badry "amounts to crimes against humanity."
The Sudanese military could not be immediately reached for comment.
The Nuba Mountains lie on the northern side of the border between Sudan and South Sudan. Violence erupted in the region and in other northern border areas shortly before South Sudan declared independence last year. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have fled the area since fighting erupted there last year.
The Sudanese government accuses the South Sudanese government of backing rebels in the Nuba Mountains, charges the South denies. Many inhabitants of South Kordofan fought for the south against the north during a civil war that lasted over two decades, and are ethnically linked to the south.
Satellite and photo imagery, cellphone video footage, and eyewitness accounts released by the U.S. monitoring group provide a picture of the two attacks on the village. The group says that some of the video was shot by members of the notorious Sudanese police force, known as "Abu Tira," who allegedly participated alongside Sudanese forces and militias in razing the village on May 18. Satellite images show before and after views of the village, while photos show huts ablaze.
"We are seeing a repeat of Darfur without the international witnesses," said John Prendergast of the U.S.-based Enough Project, referring to Sudan’s western region, which has been torn by conflict for almost a decade. Prendergast, whose advocacy group partners with Clooney, said the new material from the monitoring group "adds to mounting, and undeniable, visual evidence of a pattern of indiscriminate attacks and destruction by the government of Sudan against its own people."
More than 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur since 2003, when rebels took up arms against the central government, accusing it of discrimination and neglect.
Human Rights Watch has also documented what it called "indiscriminate bombings and abuses against civilians" in the Nuba Mountains, saying the attacks "may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity" and have created a humanitarian crisis.
Since the fighting began more than a year ago, access to the remote region by the United Nations and international aid agencies has been restricted by the Sudanese government, making it difficult to verify conditions in the area.