Earlier this week Sudan’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said it would not let the new United Nations team headed by 1997 Nobel Peace co-laureate, Jody Williams into the country unless it dropped one member.
That one member is to Guyanese-born Bertrand Ramcharan, a retired career UN official, who was reported to have said after he was named a member of the team that the government of Sudan needed to do more on the genocide.
A Reuters report out of Geneva, Switzerland yesterday said that the Sudan Foreign Ministry made no direct reference to Ramcharan, however the UN team said that “it can no longer allow the continued uncertainty regarding visas from Sudan to impede the continuance of the mission.”
The group is in Addis Ababa, where it held talks with the African Union (AU) and UN representatives and regional human rights bodies, and said it would continue its work and collect all relevant information from locations outside of Sudan.
Ramcharan, who was the UN’s Acting High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2003 to 2004 and who sent the world body first rights team to Darfur, has also written several books on human rights and was the UN’s Deputy High Commis-sioner for five years. He is now a professor at Geneva University.
Reuters said that the row over the latest mission underlines the tense state of relations between Sudan and the UN as UN envoy for Darfur Jan Eliasson and his AU counterpart began their first joint visit to Sudan. They are aiming to reinvigorate a shattered peace process and end fighting between Sudanese government forces and militias backing them, and rebels in Darfur.
Last year Sudan expelled top ranking UN official Jan Pronk. This has hindered visits by other senior representatives of the UN including the former humanitarian chief Jan Egeland.