Sudan military reported to be aiding rebel attacks
July 12, 2006 (UNITED NATIONS) — Rebels in Darfur are fighting each other with the Sudanese military apparently supporting one faction, sometimes with aircraft disguised as relief planes, a senior U.N. official said.
Jan Egeland, the humanitarian relief coordinator, told a news conference on Tuesday that the mainstream rebel faction, led by Minni Arcua Minnawi, was in conflict with splinter factions of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA).
SLA infighting had resulted in indiscriminate killings, rape, looting and the displacement of some 8,000 civilians over the past 10 days alone, Egeland said.
“It is heartbreaking to see that what the SLA groups had rightfully accused the Janjaweed of doing they are now doing themselves to the civilian population caught in the crossfire,” he said.
Janjaweed is the name given to pro-government militia, responsible for a campaign of ethnic cleansing, rape and killing against non-Arab villagers since early 2003. They had been armed by the Khartoum government to put down a rebel uprising more than three years ago.
More than 2.3 million have been thrown out of their homes, with many now in squalid camps in the Darfur region or in neighboring Chad.
Egeland said there were reports that government security forces were supporting attacks against splinter groups of the SLA. They were using white helicopters, the same color that the African Union, the United Nations and relief groups fly.
“This is again a violation of international principles and a dire threat to U.N. staff who go on the white helicopters that are neutral and impartial and should not be attacked,” Egeland said.
He also said that humanitarian workers throughout Darfur were being attacked “on an almost daily basis.”
Egeland said United Nations peacekeepers, which the Khartoum government opposes, were sorely needed because the 7,000-strong African Union monitoring force, the only bulwark against atrocities, was “not able to protect effectively the civilian population” nor humanitarian staff.
Minnawi, the SLA leader who signed a peace agreement with the government in May, has denied allegations that his fighters attacked other rebel factions, as another U.N. report in Khartoum alleged on Sunday.
The U.N. report listed a series of attacks by Minnawi’s group on other Sudan Liberation Movement factions, one led by Abdel Wahed Mohammed al-Nur and one known as the G-19, neither of which signed the Abuja peace agreement.
(Reuters)