By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, October 27 -- Following the UN Security Council's visit to Darfur on October 8, the UN has been asked to verify the arrests by Sudan of at least two people who were present in the Abu Shouk camp for internally displaced people.
On October 27, Inner City Press asked UN spokesman Martin Nesirky to confirm a report that the arrestees are Abdullah Ishaq Abdel Razek, the supervisor of the nutrition program of the IDP camp’s schools, and Mohammed Abdullah Mohammed Al-Haj, who gave a speech to Council members on October 8. Video here.
Nesirky replied that if top UN peacekeeper Alain Le Roy had been asked to look into the situation, he would. But previously, Le Roy was asked to obtain and provide a “full understanding of the facts” underlying the deadly violence this year in the Kalma IDP camp, without doing so.
In the opacity that the UN allowed after the Kalma violence, Sudan had demanded that the UN turn over five sheikhs of the Kalma camp. As exposed by Inner City Press with leaked documents, the head of the UN - African Union mission UNAMID Ibrahim Gambari was close to an agreement with Sudanese foreign minister Ali Karti to turn the five sheikhs over, in exchange for a promise not to execute by Omar al-Bashir, indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
On October 27, Inner City Press approached and asked ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo outside the UN Security Council for his view of UN turn overs to Omar al Bashir. I have nothing to do with that, Ocampo said. He said that Inner City Press' previous questions to the Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak were well placed. But what about the ICC?
While Inner City Press has repeatedly asked Nesirky for Gambari's or the UN's view of Nowak's statement that to turn the sheikhs over to Bashir would violate customary international law, no response has been provided. On October 27, Nesirky belatedly told Inner City Press that Gambari is “on leave.”
Since according to Nigerian Mission sources Gambari had been in New York since Friday, October 22 -- but didn't appear at the UN Security Council for its October 25 session on UNAMID -- questions are mounting about the appropriateness of taking a vacation in the midst of Darfur's problems, and not even pausing the vacation to attend a nearby Security Council meeting about UNAMID. Watch this site.
