SUDAN:An international criminal prosecutor has accused Sudan of violating a March 2005 UN Security Council resolution requiring it to co-operate with his investigation into war crimes in Darfur.
He also said he was launching probes into continuing government attacks against civilians and a surge in rebel violence against peacekeepers and aid workers.
"We are witnessing a calculated organised campaign by Sudanese officials to attack individuals and further destroy the social fabric of entire communities," Luis Moreno Ocampo, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, told the council yesterday.
"All information points not to chaotic and isolated acts but to a pattern of attacks."
Mr Ocampo, a former Argentine prosecutor, said Sudan had repeatedly ignored requests to arrest or surrender two prominent officials charged by the Hague-based court with orchestrating the mass killing of civilians in Darfur between 2003 and 2004: Ahmad Harun, Sudan's minister of state for humanitarian affairs, and Ali Kushyab, the leader of a government-sponsored militia.
Mr Ocampo said Khartoum had granted Mr Harun increasing authority, including responsibility for overseeing the protection of displaced civilians and the deployment of thousands of international peacekeepers in Darfur.
"The government of Sudan is not co-operating with my office or the court," Mr Ocampo told the Security Council. "While the Sudan continues to publicly insist that it is willing and able to prosecute those responsible for serious crimes, they have done nothing."
Sudan's UN ambassador, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, accused Mr Ocampo of concocting the "mother of all fabrications" and resorting to "lies". He warned that his public condemnation of the government threatened to "spoil the peace process" in Sudan. "We in no way are going to surrender our citizens to be tried" by the court, he said.
"If there are any accusations against our people, the judiciary is more than capable of doing that."
The latest surge of violence in Darfur began in February 2003, when two rebel groups took up arms against the Islamic government. The government responded with a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that has driven more than 2.5 million civilians from their homes and claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands more.
Mr Ocampo said he was expanding his investigation to determine who was protecting Mr Harun and who bore "greatest responsibility" for continuing attacks against civilians, citing an October 8th raid by Sudanese troops and allied militias in which 48 civilians were "rounded up and slaughtered" while praying in a mosque in the town of Muhajiriya.
He also said he would probe reports that the government had forcibly relocated displaced civilians and resettled their villages with families of the Janjaweed militia.