Nobel laureates urge pressure on Sudan, Myanmar

By Claudia Parsons
Mon Sep 29, 7:21 PM ET

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - African Union leaders are more interested in protecting Sudan's president than its people and Southeast Asian leaders do the same when it comes to Myanmar, a group of women Nobel Prize winners said on Monday.

"All those clubs, the African Union, ASEAN, or the U.N. Human Rights Council club, recognize their job as protecting the state rather than protecting the human rights of people from states that violate them," said Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for campaigning against land mines.

She said ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, should put more pressure on Myanmar over human rights and democracy rather than buying timber and gems that give the military junta money to support itself.


She criticized the African Union for siding with Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir over a request by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to charge Bashir with genocide in Darfur. Bashir and AU leaders have said the move would damage prospects for peace in the region.

"We need to put intense pressure on these institutions that are supposed to be having a role in protecting people," Williams told a news conference at the United Nations, reporting on a fact-finding trip to south Sudan, Chad, the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa and the Thai border with Myanmar.

The trip was organized by the Nobel Women's Initiative, which was founded in 2006 by six women Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

Williams said the reason for visiting refugees from both Myanmar and Sudan was to show the linkages between the two situations -- especially the role of China in buying oil and providing weapons that helped support the governments.

Actress Mia Farrow, a vocal campaigner on Darfur who was part of the delegation on the trip, said AU officials had been "quite agitated" when she and the others raised the subject of the ICC indictment on Bashir when they met in Addis Ababa.

She said women she met in refugee camps in Chad who had fled Darfur were unanimous in supporting the indictment requested by ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

"Babies are being born, babies are being named Moreno Ocampo," she told the news conference.

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)