A New York jury began deliberating on Thursday, October 16, on allegations that French banking giant BNP Paribas' business in Sudan contributed to atrocities under the regime of Omar al-Bashir. The trial, which began September 9 and will be decided by a jury of eight, has heard the claims of three Sudanese plaintiffs, who testified on a litany of horrors committed by Sudanese soldiers and the Janjaweed militia.
The plaintiffs – two men and one woman, all now American citizens – told the federal court in Manhattan that they had been tortured, burnt with cigarettes, slashed with a knife, and, in the case of the woman, sexually assaulted. "I have no relatives left," Entesar Osman Kasher, 41, told the New York court during the trial.
In closing remarks on Thursday, plaintiffs' attorney Bobby DiCello said the proceedings had "revealed the secret that an international bank, BNP Paribas, has rescued, shielded, fed and illegally supported the economy of a dictator." BNP Paribas "has supported the ethnic cleansing and ruined the lives of these three survivors," he said.
The French bank, which did business in Sudan from the late 1990s until 2009, provided letters of credit that allowed Sudan to honor import and export commitments. Plaintiffs argue that these assurances enabled the regime to keep exporting cotton, oil and other commodities, enabling it to receive billions of dollars from buyers; these contracts, plaintiffs argue, helped finance the violence perpetrated by Sudan against a part of its population.
