Sudan's leader Omar al-Bashir (C) walks next to a Chinese military officer as he arrives at Beijing International Airport on June 28, 2011. Sudan's leader Omar al-Bashir, who is accused of war crimes, arrived in Beijing early June 28, a day after he was due in China to meet President Hu Jintao. - AFP Photo

BEIJING: Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir arrived in China on Tuesday for talks with President Hu Jintao, as the United States and rights groups criticised Beijing for hosting an alleged war criminal.

Bashir’s presidential plane touched down in Beijing in the early hours, a day later than planned, an AFP journalist saw — after Sudan’s foreign ministry said it was forced to choose a “new route” while flying over Turkmenistan.

The unexplained change in plans has forced an overhaul of Bashir’s schedule, but not a cancellation of talks with Hu nor a red-carpet ceremony at the Great Hall of the People for a man who is unwelcome in many countries in the world.

Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity that occurred in Sudan’s western Darfur region, where about 300,000 people have died since 2003.

China is a key supporter of the Sudanese leader, who is the first sitting head of state targeted by an ICC arrest warrant.

Bashir’s meetings with Hu and other senior Chinese leaders are now set for Wednesday, according to the foreign ministry in Beijing.

The Sudanese leader had been due to stay in China until Thursday, but it was unclear whether the delay would now prolong his stay. He last visited the country in 2006.

“This visit is the continuation of the distinguished relations between Sudan and China, which have remained friendly and progressive,” Bashir told China’s official Xinhua news agency in an interview ahead of the trip.

He hailed Beijing as a “strategic partner” and also noted that China “does not intervene in the internal affairs of others”.

Beijing on Tuesday again defended the visit, with foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei saying: “As a friendly country of China, the Sudanese leader’s visit to China is quite reasonable.” The spokesman added: “In recent years, President Bashir has made many visits to foreign countries and was warmly welcomed by those countries. He will also be welcomed in China.” He said Bashir’s visit would be “conducive to the development of the traditional friendship between China and Sudan, as well as the advancement of the peace process of North-South Sudan” and would touch on Darfur.

Officials at the Sudanese embassy in Beijing were not immediately available for comment when contacted by AFP.

Beijing is a key military supplier to the regime in Khartoum and the biggest buyer of the country’s oil, although the majority of Sudan’s oil fields are located in the south, which will become independent on July 9.

In the interview with Xinhua, Bashir insisted southern independence “will not affect the relationship” between Beijing and Khartoum, hailing China as a model “real partner”.

The Sudanese leader’s visit to China has sparked outrage among rights groups, and earned the reproach of the US State Department.

“We continue to oppose invitations, facilitation, support for travel by ICC indictees,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Monday.

“We have a longstanding policy of strongly urging other nations to do the same,” she said. “We have urged China to join the international community in its call for Sudan to cooperate fully with the ICC.”ICC statutes dictate that any member country should arrest Bashir if he visits. China is not a party to those statutes, nor is the United States.

“We reserve our opinion on the ICC’s prosecution against President Bashir,” Hong said Tuesday.

Bashir arrived in China from Iran, where he attended a counter-terrorism summit which also included the leaders of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Tajikistan.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has said Bashir’s trip was “an affront to victims of heinous crimes committed in Darfur” and has urged Beijing to withdraw its invitation or arrest Bashir on arrival.

Amnesty International said earlier this month that China risked becoming a “safe haven for alleged perpetrators of genocide” if it hosted Bashir.

Topics expected to come up in Bashir’s talks with Hu include Chinese aid to Sudan and problems in Abyei, a disputed border area claimed both by Bashir’s Khartoum-based northern Sudan regime and the rival government in the south.

The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously on Monday to send a 4,200-strong Ethiopian peacekeeping force to Abyei in a bid to douse tensions.

An estimated two million people died in Sudan’s two-decade civil war.

A 2005 peace accord, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, ended the conflict and allowed for a referendum in January in which the south voted by an overwhelming majority to split from the north.

Abyei did not take part in the referendum because the two sides could not agree who should be eligible to vote.

Fighting is also flaring in South Kordofan, which borders Abyei.

A handout photo released by the United Nations Mission in Sudan shows Zambian soldiers serving with the international peacekeeping force patrolling the streets of Abyei on May 24, 2011, following an attack by the northern Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) over the weekend. - AFP Photo

JUBA: Militiamen backed by the Sudanese government are heading south to the flashpoint town Abyei as satellite images show troops, tanks and helicopters deploying, the UN said on Wednesday.

Heavily armed fighters of the nomadic Arab Misseriya tribe, key allies of the Khartoum government in the 1983-2005 civil war between north and south, were moving towards the soon-to-be-independent south, UN peacekeepers said.

Tens of thousands of civilians have fled the fighting, the UN force added, calling on both sides to show restraint.

UN mission spokeswoman Hua Jiang said: “Militia that appear to be Misseriya are moving southwards. Abyei town is deserted of civilians.” Southern officials say that the pro-northern Misseriya, a cattle-herding people who traditionally move through Abyei each year with their animals for water and pasture, are now entering Abyei in large numbers.

Thousands of Abyei residents – mainly southern-supporting Dinka Ngok people – have fled across the border into the south, with houses set on fire and property looted in the northern-controlled areas, the officials say.

A monitoring group said satellite images indicated evidence of ‘war crimes’ committed by the northern army.

“These images provide supporting documentary evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Abyei,” said John Bradshaw, director of the Enough Project campaign group, part of the coalition backing the satellite work.

The Satellite Sentinel Project, which obtained and analysed the images, said they showed “evidence of attacks by armoured vehicles and the destruction of villages.” US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice warned of the “grave humanitarian consequences” of the seizure of Abyei town by Khartoum troops as she and other Security Council delegates held talks in the southern regional capital Juba on Tuesday.

Rice said there were “horrific reports of looting and burning.” Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir rejected calls to pull the troops out.

The UN’s Hua Jiang said four peacekeeping helicopters were fired on as they took off from their Abyei base on Tuesday.

The helicopters from the UN Mission in Sudan were not hit in the shooting, the spokeswoman said.

Bashir has given a “green light” to the north’s Sudan Armed Forces to “respond to any violations” by southern forces, the official SUNA news agency said late on Tuesday.

In a defiant speech in Khartoum, he scoffed at warnings from Washington to withdraw his forces or risk jeopardising lucrative US efforts to normalise ties.

“Sudan is not greedy for the carrot of America, and does not fear from its stick,” Bashir was quoted as saying.

Abyei, a fertile border district claimed by both north and south, was due to vote on its future in January alongside a referendum on independence for the south, which delivered a landslide for secession.

But Abyei’s plebiscite did not happen amid arguments as to who was eligible to vote. On Saturday, northern troops and tanks overran the district.

The southern government has demanded that northern troops withdraw immediately.

The Satellite Sentinel Project, which provided the images, was set up by Hollywood star and human rights activist George Clooney last year.

The north’s seizure of Abyei, in the run-up to the planned international recognition of southern independence in July, has been condemned by the world powers as a threat to peace in Sudan.

While Bashir said he wanted to extend a “hand of peace to the south,” he also repeated warnings that southerners in the north must leave after the region’s independence on July 9.

“The southerners in the north will be given a period to settle their conditions, and (then) all the southerners existing illegally in the north will be transported to the south,” Bashir said.

Violence in and around Abyei has driven up to 40,000 people from their homes, a senior UN official said, sharply raising initial estimates.

“Our initial estimates are that 30,000 to 40,000 people have been displaced,” said Lise Grande, who helps coordinate UN humanitarian efforts in the south.

“That includes some 10,000 people from Abyei area fleeing direct fighting and 25,000 more from the Agok area, just across the southern border, where people are leaving homes fearing future violence,” she said.

Abyei’s capture in the run-up to international recognition of southern independence in July has been condemned by the world powers as a threat to peace between north and south.

Alima (R), born in Afghanistan, and Joseph (L), born in 1978 in southern Sudan, during an interview about their experiences as displaced children October 21, 2010 at a United Nations office in New York. Both spoke at a UN panel about “The Rights and Guarantees of Internally Displaced Children in Armed Conflict”. — Photo by AFP

UNITED NATIONS: Among all the UN accords, protocols and mechanisms that seek to defend the estimated 13.5 million children lost in conflict around the world, none mentions the right to feel a parent’s love.

And that is just what Joseph and Alima said they had missed when they appeared before a very official UN panel on children displaced by wars.

Joseph is one of the army of “Lost Boys” of Sudan. After escaping a burning hut he became separated from his mother, carried a gun before he was 10, saw many people killed, ate bats and rats to survive.

Alima was growing up in the Taliban’s Afghanistan of the 1990s when her family decided it could take no more and ended up penniless in a refugee camp in Pakistan.

“We had very different experiences but we grew up with the same fears and traumas,” Alima, now 21, told AFP in an interview after her appearance at the United Nations headquarters.

Neither gave their family name when they told their terrible stories to a UN panel on children in war, held to back a UN campaign to enforce new guidelines.

Joseph, now 32, was seven when Sudanese government soldiers tied him and his mother up in a burning hut.

“We were to be burned alive. I don’t know what happened, maybe God intervened, but there was a storm. The rain came down, the soldiers fled, and somehow my mother got us out,” he said.

The two became separated though and only made contact again in 2005, and they have still not met again.

From the age of seven to 10, he lived with the then-militant Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) soldiers.

“They were like my parents. Wherever they went I would go. If they went fighting, I would fight in the war zone.”

“I saw so many innocent people killed.”

He met his father, an SPLA soldier, but in 1990 they also became separated and Joseph joined about 30,000 orphaned children sent to camps on Sudan’s borders in an odyssey that has since been made into books and movies.

“We survived by eating rats and bats,” he recalled.

Joseph was resettled to the United States in 2001 and four years later was miraculously put in touch with his mother and two sisters in Khartoum.

“The last time I saw my mother was 25 years ago, but she is alive. I talk to her on the telephone, she tells me what is happening.

“I don’t know whether I will see my mother, maybe she will die,” he said.

Joseph now studies criminal justice in Washington, DC. His father is still in the south Sudan military. The looming self-determination referendum in the country worries him.

‘I was never a child’

He says it is too dangerous to return and he cannot afford to bring his whole family out.

“I feel like I was never a child, that I was always an adult. I feel like I have lost my whole life. To have never had my mother next to me is a horrible feeling, like I was never born,” he said.

Children in war, he said, are “treated like animals. Many of them don’t even know their birthday, many of them die like animals, with no voice.”

Afghanistan’s troubles forced Alima and her parents and seven brothers and sisters to move from the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, first to the capital Kabul and then to join the millions in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran before they were resettled to the United States.

Now a pharmacy student at the University of Washington in Seattle, Alima said the Taliban still give her nightmares.

“They don’t think women and men are equal. They mistreat women, they rape women. I have seen how.”

She was with one of her mother’s best friends in a Kabul market when the woman was beaten for not covering her feet.

“I remember them, I remember what they looked like, I remember how they talked, I remember what they did. I have tried hard to erase them from my memory but it is really hard. It holds me back in life.

“I have friends whose father and brothers were murdered in front of them. There are families whose stories are a lot worse than mine,” she said.

“It is something that is haunting me and I can’t just let it go. So I want to speak out about it and help out and then one day I will feel that I actually did help and then maybe those haunting memories will let go.”

Alima said she wanted to speak for the “millions out there who are still in that torment, as me and Joseph.

“They have no family and they have no voice. Nobody to love and don’t feel love back. We need to help them.”

In southern Sudan, boys and girls are still only gradually being released from camps. In Somalia, Burundi, Nepal and other countries there are countless children displaced and without parents.

Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN special representative for children and armed conflict, said “they are like aliens in their own country” and that governments must take care of children who become lost in wars.

Too many want the United Nations to take responsibility. “That should not be,” she said. “The mark of sovereignty is that you will protect your civilians and your citizens.”

The UN guidelines say that governments must keep families together, make sure children receive education and emotional support, as well as protection from violence and trafficking.

Fifty-six UN states have still not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict.