Sudan
New: Photos and William Schulz' Diary from Mission »
Interview
with William Schulz, Director AI USA
Today in Nyala was a classic Amnesty day.
We visited government officials and addressed a wide variety of human rights violations taking place here.
We visited a prison and met with two potential prisoners of conscience, two lawyers who were arrested and have been in prison now for approximately 6 weeks, allegedly for no greater crime than in one case having a client who was among the victims of attacks and who was attempting to bring court action to seek redress from those attacks. And another individual who was alleged to have connections with the Sudan Liberation Army, but there is little evidence that that lawyer did. So, we met with them, heard their cases, we were given remarkable access to the prisons here by the authorities. In fact, the authorities themselves have been quite open to talking with us and to meeting with us and to allowing us access to a wide variety of people.
We also visited a second Internally Displaced Persons, IDP camp. We had gone to one large camp yesterday, with at least 80,000 people, most of them victims, they say, of militia attacks. We went to a much smaller camp today where the people said that they were victims of attacks by the rebel forces. There are about 4,000 people in that camp. We spent a great deal of time in those camps, both yesterday and today, gathering stories from the people about how they came to be there, what kind of services, food, support they're receiving and what they need and what they want for the future.
So, it was a classic Amnesty day dealing with everything from potential prisoners of conscience to the massive crimes that are taking place here and resulting in the displacement and creation of tens of thousands of IDPs and refugees.
