U.S. and European media

October 30, 2022

Agence France-Presse: UN peacekeeper killed in Darfur attack. Gunmen killed a South African peacekeeper with the UN-led mission in Sudan's Darfur region and seriously wounded a female soldier in the second deadly ambush against the under-equipped force in weeks. Wednesday's shooting brings to 11 the number of peacekeepers for the African Union-United Nations (UNAMID) force to have died since the mission launched operations on December 31, spokesman Noureddine Mezni said. Attackers opened fire on the two South African soldiers about a kilometre (half a mile) from a military base for the mission in northern Darfur. "Unknown armed men opened fire yesterday afternoon at a water point near UNAMID camp in Kutum. They were evacuated to our base in Kutum. The man died and the female soldier is still alive," Mezni told AFP.

Associated Press: Sudanese president tries to improve image. Facing genocide charges from an international tribunal, Sudan's president has taken several steps recently to shore up his image. But some say the gestures are "too little, too late." President Omar Al-Bashir's latest moves include holding a high-profile Darfur peace conference -- which his opponents called a farce -- and speeding up deployment of international peacekeepers in Darfur. He also arrested an Arab militia leader charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court -- the same court that charged al-Bashir with genocide in Darfur. The government says the militia leader will be tried in a domestic court, but hasn't set a date or outlined the charges. Many are dubious that al-Bashir's moves are more than an attempt to head off an ICC arrest warrant.

Newsweek: Piercing the Silence. Too often, atrocities blur into abstractions. The burned-out villages; the camps for the desperate displaced; the brutalized women--for all that we've seen, read and heard about Darfur, for all the celebrities who've adopted it as their own cause célèbre, it's still hard for us to get a real sense of the hideousness that has taken place there. Halima Bashir might be the person who finally pulls us through that barrier.

Reuters: China sends officials to handle Sudan hostage crisis. China sent a team of officials to Sudan on Thursday to seek the release of kidnapped oil workers in the disputed aftermath of rescue efforts after four Chinese hostages were killed. Officials from the Foreign Ministry, Commerce Ministry and China National Petroleum Corpn (CNPC) left Beijing to "negotiate with the Sudanese side on all-out efforts and measures of rescuing a worker still missing," Xinhua news agency reported. The Foreign Ministry said two were still missing. The move appeared to be an attempt to bolster control of a standoff that went badly wrong on Monday, when the four kidnapped Chinese oil workers died in a clash between their captors and Sudanese forces. The killings and confusion have cast a shadow over Beijing's ties with the oil-producing African country, where China is a key investor and supplier of arms.

The Darfur Daily News is a service of the Save Darfur Coalition. To subscribe to the Daily News, please email [email protected]. For media inquiries, please contact Ashley Roberts at (202) 478-6181, or [email protected].