GENEVA, Dec 8 (AFP) - The United Nations condemned Monday the public flogging last week in Khartoum of a group of women, a punishment carried out under strict Islamic sharia laws adhered to in Sudan. According to Gaspar Biro, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Sudan, 34 women were subjected to 10 strokes each. One woman was flogged with 40 strokes for "improper dress", wearing trousers and a T-shirt. The punishment was meted out by the authorities after a group of women protested December 1 against the forceful conscription of male relatives into military training camps. On that occasion, Biro stated, some 50 women, "including the elderly, were brutally assaulted with sticks and rubber hoses and slapped on their faces by police and security officers." Biro and three other special rapporteurs have written to the Sudanese ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. The UN human rights observer also complained of the situation in the south of the country where government forces are engaged in a long-standing civil war with the mainly Christian and animist southerners. "I continue to receive reports on slavery, especially in the Bahral Ghazal area," Biro told reporters here. "Raids are reportedly continuing, carried out by paramilitary units which are called popular defense forces and they are fighting the war together with the government army. It seems the war has escalated in the past few months."
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