NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — A dug-up site in a sealed-off region of Sudan appears to be a mass grave, a U.S. satellite monitoring group said Thursday, offering the first aerial photographs from a conflict zone that outside observers can’t access.
The Satellite Sentinel Project said it had photographic evidence and witness testimony indicating that systematic killings and mass burials are taking place in Southern Kordofan state, where Sudan’s Arab military has been targeting a black ethnic minority loyal to the military of the newly independent Republic of South Sudan.
Fighting broke out in the region on June 5. Neither the U.N., outside aid groups or journalists have access to the region, raising fears that more violence is being carried out than is known publicly.
The satellite group released an image analyzed by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and said three excavated areas measuring about 26 meters (28 yards) by 5 meters (5.5 yards) are visible near a school in the town of Kadugli. The group said that an eyewitness reported seeing 100 bodies or more put into one of the pits on June 8.
Nathaniel A. Raymond, of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, which analyzes the project’s images, said the group is confident in its findings of evidence consistent with mass graves and conditions with alleged mass killings of civilians.
“The overall pattern we are seeing makes the most sense in the context of eyewitness reports of systematic killing by the Sudan Armed Forces and allied militias,” said Raymond, who added that the group’s images show what appear to be transport and dump trucks in parts of Kadugli where fighting is not reported to be occurring.
“The question is, then, what are they doing? The combination of satellite imagery and eyewitness reports, sadly, help explain what they are apparently doing, which is collecting and removing bodies,” he said. “The DigitalGlobe satellite images contain many of the details and hallmarks of the mass atrocities described by at least five eyewitnesses to the alleged killings.”
After the violence broke out, the U.N. said at least 73,000 people had fled the region. Many of the displaced are ethnic Nuba who have long been marginalized. They are mostly seeking shelter in nearby communities or hiding out in the Nuba Mountains where they have no access to medical assistance, food and clean water.
Authorities in South Kordofan are barring international aid agencies from entering the region, and journalists are not able to safely access it. Activists fear the Khartoum government is carrying out targeted killings like those in Darfur over the last decade.
Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts who has written a book on the atrocities in the western Sudan region of Darfur and is following the violence in Kordofan, said reports have been coming out of the Nuba Mountains for weeks of targeted killings. He had not seen the satellite photos when contacted late Wednesday but said the satellite project had an “impeccable” record of interpreting previous satellite images from Sudan, particularly the contested region of Abyei.
“No one will be able to express skepticism after the confirmation of mass graves. We’ve had these reports for weeks now, and they keep coming,” said Reeves, who has been urging the Obama administration to take greater action. “We now have, if not a smoking gun, satellite confirmation of ethnically targeted extermination efforts.”
The satellite project said it was told by an eyewitness that Sudanese Armed Forces troops, militia fighters, men in brown uniforms consisted with those worn by prisoners and individuals dressed in a manner consistent with Sudan Red Crescent Society workers were seen driving close to the alleged mass grave site. The project did not identify any witnesses or its means of communicating with them for fear or reprisal attacks.
“Men at the site were reportedly unloading dead bodies from the trucks and depositing them in the open pits. The individual claims to have seen some bodies in what appeared to be bags,” said the report, which was titled “Crime Scene: Evidence of Mass Graves in Kadugli.” Above the title in a red banner reads: “Mass Atrocity Alert.”
A U.N. report obtained by The Associated Press last month said that Sudanese intelligence agents posed as Red Crescent workers and ordered refugees to leave a U.N.-protected camp in Southern Kordofan. The U.N. report contained no information about what happened to those people afterward.
Reeves said that his contacts in Kadugli have reported security roadblocks, house-to-house searches for supporters of the South Sudan military, and executions on the street.
“What’s happening beyond Kadugli, beyond the Nuba Mountains, in places we haven’t heard of, is that these Nuba people are being exterminated,” he said.
The Nuba people have been targeted by Khartoum before. Reeves said that during killings in the 1990s, information from the region was sealed tight, and that no one knew the killings were taking place for two or three yeas.
“It was a black box genocide, as Darfur is becoming a black box genocide, and as I will predict will happen in Kordofan in the next couple months.”
Comments