Darfur rebels & Sudan’s government meet in Tanzania over uncertain peace talks

Aug 23, 2005 (Dar es salaam) — Representatives of Sudan’s government and the two rebel factions fighting in the troubled western Darfur region are meeting in Tanzania to salvage stalled peace talks, officials said Tuesday.

Under the auspices of Salim Ahmed Salim, the African Union (AU) special envoy for Darfur, the three sides began unofficial talks in Dar es Salaam at the weekend amid disputes over when the Nigerian-hosted negotiations should resume.

Details of the talks, which reportedly began on Saturday, were not available but officials at the Mwalimu Nyerere Foundation which Salim chairs said he was expected to make a Sudan-related announcement at a Wednesday news conference.

Salim, a Tanzanian politician and former secretary general of the now-defunct Organization of African Unity (OAU), has been trying to bring Khartoum and the two rebel groups — the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) — together to discuss the date for the talks to begin again.

“They are in Dar es Salaam to set another date,” an AU official told AFP at the pan-African body’s headquarters in Addis Ababa.

The talks in the Nigerian capital of Abuja had been due to resume on Wednesday but the SLM earlier this month urged them to be put off until the beginning of October, a call Khartoum deplored as not being in the interests of peace.

Violence broke out in Darfur in February 2003 when a rebel uprising led Khartoum to unleash Arab militias known as the Janjaweed in a scorched-earth campaign.

The conflict has claimed between 180,000 and 300,000 lives, displaced around 2.4 million people and sent more than 200,000 fleeing to neighbouring Chad, sparking one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

AFP/ST