Attachments
- SUMMARY
When war broke out in Sudan’s Blue Nile state in September 2011, waves of refugees numbering in the tens of thousands poured out of the southern half of the state, fleeing indiscriminate aerial bombings and deliberate ground attacks by Sudanese military forces. Now, nearly two years later, some 150,000 people from Blue Nile state languish in a string of refugee camps in neighboring Ethiopia and South Sudan, and tens of thousands more have been forcibly displaced within Sudan. And although the frequency of armed clashes between Sudanese government and rebel forces has diminished, violence against civilians continues.
“I lost my daughter last month when an Antonov bombed us,” a father who recently arrived in a refugee camp in South Sudan told Amnesty International in April, referring to the heavy,
Russian-made transport planes that the Sudanese military uses to carry out its bombing runs. “When I heard the sound of the Antonov I yelled to my children to lie down on the ground. It dropped a bomb, and I heard my wife cry out, ‘my child, my child, my child’. . . . She was eight years old.”
Not just one but three children were killed in that attack, one of several 2013 attacks on civilian areas in Blue Nile state that Amnesty International has documented. While the Sudanese government says that it is fighting an armed rebellion by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA-N), civilians in SPLA-N-held areas of the state are bearing the brunt of the violence. In what appears to be a concerted attempt to clear the civilian population out of SPLA-N-held areas, and to punish the residents of these areas for their perceived support of the SLPA-N, the Sudanese government has both attacked civilians and denied UN agencies and humanitarian groups access to assist them.
Indiscriminate bombing has been the Sudanese government’s signature tactic in Blue Nile state, to devastating effect. Bombs have injured and killed civilians, and damaged and destroyed civilian infrastructure, including homes, schools, health clinics and farmland.
Sudanese forces have also employed indiscriminate shelling, deliberate ground assaults on civilian villages, and abusive proxy forces. These actions constitute war crimes—which, given their apparent widespread, as well as systematic, nature—may amount to crimes against humanity.
The Ingessana Hills, the birthplace of rebel leader Malik Agar, have been particularly hard hit. During the first half of 2012, the Sudanese government carried out a deliberate scorched earth campaign of shelling, bombing, and burning down civilian villages in the area, and forcibly displacing many thousands of people. Some civilians who were unable to escape were burned alive in their homes; others were reportedly shot dead. The wide scale of the attacks was confirmed by satellite images obtained by Amnesty International, which show village after village in which nearly all of the homes were destroyed by fire, as were mosques, schools and other structures. Now, the only signs of life in these villages are Sudanese military positions.