Hundreds of people gathered outside a UN base for safety after Sudan's
armed forces moved to crush a fresh rebellion by opposition militia in the
town of Kadugli in the country's southeast.
They were refused entry to the fortified compound and instead camped outside
its barbed wire perimeter with little shelter, food or water.
Reverend Barnaba Ibrahim said soldiers arrived in the middle of the night and
dragged men accused of being rebel sympathisers away to be killed.
The allegations, supported by other reports from the area, again call into
question the ability of the f650 million-a-year UN mission in Sudan to
fulfil its mandate to protect civilians.
"I was just hiding, lying down pretending to be asleep, and they took the
man next to me and beat him to death with sticks, five metres from the walls
of the UN base," Rev Ibrahim said in Juba, capital of South Sudan,
where he has fled for safety.
"Two other men were taken the same night. They were screaming and
protesting.
The next day, we found their bodies nearby and they had been shot." Rev
Barnaba, an Anglican pastor from Kadugli, said that "there is no way
the peacekeepers did not know what was happening".
"There are armed guards all around that place, even at night," he
said, still wearing the white shirt and grey slacks he fled in, a month ago.
"The peacekeepers are supposed to be there to protect us. They did
nothing. This happened more than the one time I witnessed." Anderson
Yacoub, who works with the Anglican diocese of Kadugli, said colleagues
sleeping outside the same UN base, at Shaahir on the city's outskirts, had
reported similar stories.
"There were other people who fled into the mountains, even though that
seemed more dangerous, and they survived," he said, also in Juba.
"Those others who went seeking refuge at the UN, they were the ones who
died." The United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) has been plagued by
allegations that it has repeatedly failed to carry out its central mandate
to protect civilians, by force if necessary.
The most recent fighting in Kadugli, in Southern Kordofan, followed an
allegedly rigged election when the candidate favoured by the regime in
Khartoum, Sudan's capital, was installed as governor.
Sudan's Air Force began bombing civilian areas early in June. Ground forces
then mounted operations to crush fighters from the Nuba Mountains arm of the
southern People's Liberation Movement.
Government soldiers and their allied militia allegedly mounted roadblocks with
lists of names of opposition supporters, who were reportedly then dragged
from their cars and have not been seen since, Rev Ibrahim and Mr Yacoub
said.
Churches have been bombed during Sunday services, and large groups of people
are currently sheltering from fresh aerial attacks in caves in the Nuba
Mountains.
Hundreds of people have been killed, and tens of thousands more have fled into
South Sudan. International humanitarian access is severely limited.
The attack witnessed by Rev Ibrahim took place on June 10 outside an UNMIS
base then manned by Egyptian peacekeepers.
Kouider Zerrouk, UNMIS spokesman, said: "We need to be very careful about what
is rumour and what is fact. We have fully investigated reports that people
were killed in the vicinity of our compound in Shaahir, and we found that
they were untrue.
"No-one has yet made the allegations of people beaten to death that
close, if it is one, two, five metres from our perimeter.
"We will always investigate all such reports."
The UNMIS deployment of more than 10,000 uniformed troops is due to be wound
down once South
Sudan gains independence on Saturday.
A new 7,000-strong mission focused solely on the south was approved by the UN
Security Council in New York Friday.
