New UN Panel of Experts on Sudan Report

The UN Security Council's Panel of Experts on the Sudan has released its annual report. As expected it's a page turner. At 94 pages, with photographs (always the fun part), it documents violations of the arms embargo both by the Sudanese authorities and by other belligerents.

As the New York Times reports, an interesting tidbit is that it seems the Government of Sudan has obtained UAVs from Iran...Sudan, which of course tries to trip up investigations as much as possible (by delaying visas and the like). Apparently, Sudan is going to ask for the Panel's mandate to be terminated (it wasn't, it was renewed through October 2010).

According to the New York Times, Sudan's ambassador to the United Nations, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem, described the Expert Panel members as follows:

“They are just representatives of Western intelligence agencies,” he said in an interview. “We are fed up with this committee. Our position is a total rejection of this report.”

Finally, the report documents human rights violations, attacks on villages, and of course attempts to track weapons shipments.