UNITED NATIONS – Sudan has violated an embargo on arms transfers to its war-torn Darfur region and disguised planes to look like U.N. humanitarian aircraft, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations said on Tuesday.
Speaking at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Darfur, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad accused Khartoum of a litany of duplicitous actions, all of which he said had been documented by an expert panel of the U.N. Sanctions Committee.
They included “violating the limited arms embargo on Darfur, using aircraft painted to resemble U.N. humanitarian aircraft, (and) conducting offensive overflights in Darfur.”
He also accused Sudan of “not accepting that there is no impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity” — a reference to Khartoum’s refusal to hand over two men indicted by the International Criminal Court for mass murder in Darfur.
Sudan’s U.N. Ambassador Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem dismissed the allegations, adding that the charge about painting aircraft to look like U.N. planes had been recycled from a year ago.
Separately, a top U.N. peacekeeping official said that her department had revised its forecast for the deployment of U.N.-African Union peacekeepers in Darfur, known as UNAMID.
The U.N. under-secretary-general for field support, Susana Malcorra, told the council that her new targets assumed that 60 percent of UNAMID’s full mandated strength of 26,000 would be deployed by the year’s end.
The new U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy had said last month he expected only half would reach Darfur by December 31.
Malcorra said a previous U.N. goal of 80 percent of full UNAMID deployment by the end of this year had been unrealistic. That would be reached by the end of March 2009, she said.
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