African Union urges all Darfur rebel groups to attend Arusha talks

July 26, 2007 (DAR ES SALAAM) — An African Union (AU) envoy on Thursday urged all Darfur’s rebels to attend a meeting in Tanzania next week aimed at ending chaos in their region.

Salim Ahmed Salim, the AU’s special envoy for Darfur, said the Aug. 3-5 conference in Arusha would discuss when and where the rebel groups might hold talks with the Khartoum government, and how to forge a common negotiating position between them.

“We would like everybody big or small to be part of it. We want the agreement to be accepted by all stakeholders,” Salim told reporters in Tanzania’s commercial capital Dar es Salaam.

“The Arusha meeting will be the last before the commencement of the final talks toward resolving the Darfur conflicts.”

The meeting, which is also being organised with the help of the United Nations, will be co-chaired by Salim and the U.N. special envoy to Darfur Jan Eliasson. Salim said the Sudanese government would not be represented in Arusha.

Abdelwahid al-Nur, leader of Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), told Sudan Tribune that his group has decided not to participate in the Arusha meeting saying that the international community needs to provide security for civilians in Darfur.

Violence flared in Sudan’s western Darfur region after mostly non-Arab guerrillas took up arms in 2003 accusing Khartoum of neglecting their remote, arid homeland.

Since then, Darfur’s rebels have fractured into more than a dozen armed groups following an unpopular peace deal last year with the government that only one faction signed.

Experts estimate some 200,000 people have died in Darfur in what the United States has called genocide. Sudan’s government rejects that term and says about 9,000 people have died.

(Reuters/ST)