US arms sales making world less safe: Sudan

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Sudans UN Ambassador on late Friday dismissed as irresponsible US allegations that weapons from northern Sudan were going to armed groups in the semi-autonomous south ahead of a nationwide April election.
The envoy further said that it was US arms sales that were making the world less safe, not weapons from his oil-rich African nation.
Earlier this week the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said Washington was concerned about the flow of arms, including heavy weapons, into southern Sudan, and believed they were coming from northern Sudan and neighbouring countries.
Sudanese Ambassador Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem told Reuters that Khartoum categorically denied Rices allegations.
The statement by the US Ambassador to the UN attributing arms flows to south Sudan to the north is most irresponsible, he said in an interview.
It demonstrates that Susan Rice is still imprisoning herself in the past and failed to move from an activist position to that of a worthy representative of a superpower.
UN officials have said privately that they, too, suspect the north was supplying southern militants with weapons.
The Sudanese envoy also reacted angrily to comments from the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who said this week that he expected a genocide charge soon against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
Abdalhaleem said that the enemies of Sudan were trying to use Moreno-Ocampo to destroy the peace process for Sudans western Darfur region and insisted that Khartoum would never cooperate with The Hague-based court.
He said Moreno-Ocampo was just a screwdriver in the workshop of double standards and injustice and the ICC is the European Guantanamo. He was referring to the controversial US military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Bashir in March 2009 for alleged war crimes in Sudans western Darfur region in connection with mass killings and deportations, but it said there were insufficient grounds to charge him with genocide.