New Photos Indicate Arms Flow to Darfur

By Nora Boustany
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 24, 2007

Recent photographs purportedly showing Sudanese soldiers in the Darfur region moving containers from a Russian-made Antonov cargo plane onto military trucks reinforce suspicions that Sudan continues to violate a U.N.-imposed arms embargo, the London-based human rights group Amnesty International said.

The photographs, taken in July and released today by the rights group, also purportedly show Russian-supplied Mi-7 and Mi-24 military helicopters in the town of Geneina in Darfur.

A Russian-supplied Mi-24 helicopter, bearing No. 928, is shown in July at an airport in Geneina, a town in Sudan's Darfur region. Russia provided 12 such aircraft to Sudan in 2005. (Amnesty International)

Eyewitnesses in Darfur and the International Peace Information Service, based in Antwerp, Belgium, sent the photographs to Amnesty. The images bolster evidence published in a May report by Amnesty that accused Russia and China of having broken the arms embargo, according to a news release from the human rights group.

Read the rest of the story at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/23/AR2007082302088.html?hpid=moreheadlines

On the ground:

Touma, a young refugee woman held against her will in a Janjaweed camp, broke down in tears as, three years on, she told her story.

"I had my child on my back and was running. The Janjaweed hit me and I fell. They took the baby off my back and killed the baby," she said.

"They took me to their camp, I spent three months there. I did their cooking and washing and took care of their animals. Every night 10 or 11 men would come to rape me - I would cry but nobody would come."

It has been more than three years since the 230,000 Sudanese refugees who are living along Chad's eastern border with Darfur fled their homes, and their pain shows little sign of abating.

At least 200,000 people have died since 2003, and most refugees have horrific accounts of rape and murder by the Janjaweed, an Arab militia armed by Khartoum to help crush a non-Arab uprising seeking greater autonomy for Darfur.

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=8f1a9c56-052f-44f2-b57d-b74f814026db

for more in-depth coverage:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/interactives/sudan/