Daily Darfur: Curious Reshuffle of Khartoum Hardliner

by Michelle

category: Daily Darfur

Published August 14, 2009 @ 04:56AM PT

This will be the last of the Daily Darfur posts --- switching to a weekly overview next week.

Another wave of government reshuffling just passed through Khartoum: Security and intelligence chief and party hardliner Salah Gosh, who is accused by human rights groups of involvement in the atrocities in Darfur, was relieved of his post last night and re-appointed as an adviser to President Omar al-Bashir.

As the Sudan Tribune recounts, Gosh is a particularly nefarious character, with the highlights of his ambitious career including severe crackdowns on political opposition and creative torture methods, plotting a failed assassination attempt against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 1995, aiding Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, and arming Darfur's notorious Janjaweed militias.

No reason was given for the move, and nothing much has surfaced yet on his replacement. It's difficult to imagine anyone more hardline than Gosh --- is his replacement more of the same, or more of a moderate?

Bashir, meanwhile, gave his first interview to an American media outlet, which aired last night on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. As with his interview with the BBC in May, Bashir was defiant, accusing the West of using the International Criminal Court to "terrorize" countries that are "disobedient." Regarding the government's conduct in Darfur, Bashir once again avoided any acknowledgement of the crimes, saying simply: "In any war, mistakes happen on the ground."

I suppose that "disobedient" is one way to characterize systematic attacks against millions of civilians....in the "understatement of the century" category of descriptors.

You can listen to Save Darfur President Jerry Fowler's rebuttal here.

Quickies

Michael Kevane rebuts US Special Envoy Scott Gration's claims that sanctions need to be lifted on North Sudan to allow "large equipment" to flow through Port Sudan to aid development in the South, rather than through the port in Mombasa. Kevane quips: "Because we've seen how easy it has been for Darfur to develop since they've always had a clear route to the sea for ‘large equipment'..."

Radio Dabanga writes that 21 Darfuri families are reporting missing relatives, after government security forces conducted wave of arrests in an internally displaced persons camp in North Darfur.