SUDAN-RIGHTS: U.S. group assails repression in north/EMBARGO
WASHINGTON, Nov 08 (IPS) - Five years after taking power, the military regime which rules Sudan has effectively banned all forms of political opposition in the country, according to a new report released here Thursday by a Human Rights Watch/Africa (HRW/Africa).
The new report, entitled 'In the Name of God', says the regime of Gen. Omar Bashir, is dominated by the National Islamic Front (NIF) which has directed purges of the civil service and the dismantling of any element of civil society that challenges its vision of an Islamic state.
"The whole country is politically controlled by a tiny ideological elite," according to the 43-page report.
The group, formerly known as Africa Watch, also charges the regime with taking "extraordinary measures to prevent the world from learning (about) its abysmal human rights record."
It has excluded or restricted independent observers, journalists, human rights monitors and humanitarian organisations, while Sudanese who have tried to speak out on human rights have been threatened or arrested, the report says.
Top-ranking leaders of all opposition parties have been arrested repeatedly since 1989, while detentions of other political activists have been carried out in ways designed to terrorise and intimidate.
Mistreatment and torture -- sometimes in unacknowledged detention centres called "ghost houses" -- have been routine, according to the report.
Armed conflict in the south between the mainly Christian or animist African population and government forces has provided the backdrop to especially appalling abuse, according to the report. HRW Africa issued a special report on the war's abuses last July.
In particular, thousands of displaced southern boys, many of whom have been detained in government dragnets and removed from the region without notifying their families, have been subjected to indoctrination and eventual incorporation into the government militias, according to the report.
The conflict has spread north with the peoples of the Nuba Mountains of southern Kordofan now caught in the middle between the army and government-backed militia on the one hand, and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) on the other.
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