Darfur rebels, Sudan government press on towards ceasefire deal
NDJAMENA, April 8 (AFP) — Members of the Sudanese government and rebels from the western Darfur region resumed talks to try to reach a ceasefire deal in a 14-month war.
The two delegations, in talks attended by Chad’s President Idriss Deby, were likely soon to agree both on a renewable 45-day ceasefire and on humanitarian issues they had thrashed out on Wednesday, sources close to the talks said.
The mood in the Chadian capital Ndjamena was “optimistic”, one of the sources told AFP, asking not to be named, but saying an accord could perhaps be signed during the course of the day.
First signs of a breakthrough in Chad’s efforts to mediate a settlement to end the Darfur conflict came when the two sides began direct talks here Tuesday. The fighting has claimed more than 10,000 lives since February 2003.
The United Nations and the US government have expressed great alarm at the plight of 670,000 people displaced inside Sudan and a further 100,000 who have fled across the border into eastern Chad.
Earlier Thursday, a diplomatic source said the talks stalled in the early hours of the morning on secondary issues relating to the ceasefire accord.
Khartoum’s delegates, the source told AFP, did not want the text to contain explicit references to the Janjawid, Arab militias allied to government troops.
These forces have been accused by the UN and non-governmental organisations of “ethnic cleansing” and “atrocities” against civilians. The rebels insisted that references to Janjawid should be included in whatever accord was reached, the source said.
The rebels in Darfur, a region populated by non-Arab Muslims, contend that their region has been marginalised by the Arab, Muslim authorities in Khartoum.
They also fear the exclusion of their region from a power and wealth-sharing accord in the final stages of negotiation between Khartoum and separate rebels who have been at war in the mainly Christian south.
That conflict has become the longest in Africa, and has claimed an estimated 1.5 million lives since 1983.
Once the face-to-face talks were under way, Deby announced that the agenda covered: “One, humanitarian issues, two, the ceasefire, three, the political questions.”
US President George W. Bush on Wednesday urged the Khartoum government to take immediate action to end “atrocities” in Darfur, saying fighting there “has opened a new chapter of tragedy in Sudan’s troubled history.”
“The Sudanese government must immediately stop local militias from committing atrocities against the local population and must provide unrestricted access to humanitarian aid agencies. I condemn these atrocities, which are displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians.”
In Geneva, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Wednesday told the UN Human Rights Commission that reports of “ethnic cleansing” and atrocities in the west of Sudan “leave me with a deep sense of foreboding.
“It is vital that international humanitarian workers and human rights experts be given full access to the region, and to the victims, without further delay,” Annan said.
“If that is denied, the international community must be prepared to take swift and appropriate action,” he added. “By ‘action’ in such situations I mean a continuum of steps, which may include military action.”