ICGLR to pursue Darfur rebels

BY UGAMEDIA
As part of unending efforts by the International Conference on the Great Lakes to eliminate all negatives forces in the area foreign ministers of the 11 member states have agreed to include armed negative forces operating in Darfur on the wanted list.

“The ministers agreed to recognize the existence of armed negative forces operating in Darfur and include them in the regional effort in the fight against the negative forces,” states in part the report by the inter-ministerial committee meeting of International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) held at Munyonyo Resort Hotel in Kampala, Uganda from December 13 to 14.

The presence of negative forces in Sudan has incited very bitter conflicts that have been the center of sexual and gender based violence, the main subject of the Kampala Great Lakes meeting.

Initially, there were only two groups fighting in Sudan's Darfur region - the Justice for Equality Movement (Jem) and the larger Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) – with very different ideological backgrounds that sparked off war against the Khartoum administration.

However, SLA later on split in different factions. By late 2005, the SLA had splintered into three different movements led by Abdel Wahid, Minni Minawi, and a group of Abdel Wahid’s former commanders.

The ICGLR initial role in Sudan as part of the wider operation against the negative forces there will be to investigate human rights abuses committed by both the rebels and the Sudanese forces.
A committee has already been set up to investigate allegations of genocide in south Kordofan and the Blue Nile whose findings will be presented at the end of next year. The ICGLR says it has received complaints from the International Refugees Rights Initiative, Darfur Consortium of NGOs and reports of the United Nations on allegations of serious violations of human rights that could amount to the crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in the region of south Kordofan and Blue Nile.

The organization’s committee on the prevention of genocide that has been charged with the investigations says it will undertake a fact-finding mission in Sudan and present its findings to the ICGLR inter-ministerial committee at the end of 2012.