By Warren P. Strobel and Sudarsan Raghavan

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON – An intensive U.S. government-funded study has confirmed widespread atrocities against Africans in the Darfur region of Sudan, including mass rape and summary executions of male villagers, the study’s director and senior Bush administration officials said Wednesday.

The report doesn’t explicitly address the question of whether genocide is occurring, those familiar with it say. But it increases the pressure on Secretary of State Colin Powell as he weighs a determination of genocide.

The report, based on 1,200 interviews with refugees, also found evidence of close cooperation between the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed, the Arab militia that’s been terrorizing black African villagers.

“Based on the information we gathered, the links seemed very strong between the Janjaweed and the government,” said Stefanie Frease of the Washington-based Coalition for International Justice, which oversaw the study with a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Sudan’s government, which faces growing international pressure over the humanitarian crisis, has denied having control over the militia.

Frease said the refugees, selected at random for interviews, offered firsthand accounts of racially motivated attacks.

In some instances, she said, the Janjaweed would take infants from their mothers’ backs. If the child was a boy, it would be killed by crushing or knifing. Female infants would be tossed aside.

Frease, the project’s coordinator, emphasized that its purpose was to document facts, not make a determination of genocide.

But she said that in her personal view, “If you read the (1948) Genocide Convention, and you look at the definition … you can definitely see the indicators there. … It’s not Rwanda and it’s not the Holocaust. It’s probably a different, slower sort of genocide.”

Genocide is defined in the 1948 convention as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

More than 30,000 people have been killed and 1 million made homeless in the Darfur region of Sudan, a country riven by a split between its Arab population, which controls the government, and its black Africans.

The crisis began 18 months ago with a rebellion by tribes seeking redress for inequalities. The government responded by recruiting the Janjaweed, Arab horsemen who’ve destroyed villages, murdered and raped, according to reports by diplomats, nongovernmental organizations and the news media.

The Sudanese government in Khartoum faces a Monday deadline imposed by the U.N. Security Council to disarm the Janjaweed and bring human rights violators to justice or face sanctions.

The U.S. government-funded study, the largest of its kind, is being reviewed by officials at the State Department, which must make a determination of genocide.

Powell, who visited Darfur and Khartoum in June, has said repeatedly that the Bush administration is doing everything it can to deal with the crisis, whether or not it’s genocide.

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