Sudan government says Darfur rebels violating ceasefire
NDJAMENA, May 5 (AFP) — The Sudanese government has accused rebels of violating a month-old ceasefire for the Darfur region in western Sudan, a member of the Chadian team trying to broker a peace pact has said.
The rebel “Justice and Equality Movement is recruiting youths from different tribes in Darfur and, at the same time, reinforcing its positions,” the Chadian official cited a complaint, filed late Tuesday by the Sudanese embassy, as saying.
“The rebels are looting and threatening civilians,” the complaint said, accusing rebels of livestock rustling.
The war in Darfur is estimated by the United Nations to have claimed at least 10,000 lives in little more than a year, uprooted a million people from their homes, and driven more than 100,000 to seek shelter across the Chadian border.
The signatories of the truce deal signed on April 8 in the Chadian capital — the Khartoum government and two rebel groups, the JEM and the Sudan Liberation Movement — agreed to cease hostilities, guarantee safe passage for humanitarian aid to the stricken region, free prisoners of war and disarm militias blamed for much of the violence.
Last week, the rebels accused Khartoum of violating the most recent truce for the region, signed on April 8 in Ndjamena after the failure of two short-lived ceasefire pacts.
JEM’s military spokesman said Khartoum had not disarmed a feared Arab militia group, the Janjawid, that is fighting alongside government forces in Darfur, but “setting them up in four places to integrate them into the army.”
And a member of the Chadian mediation team on April 29 accused the Janjawid of attacking a town inside Chad, killing one civilian and wounding many others.
“This situation is all the more unacceptable because the Sudanese army tolerates and offers land and air backup to the Janjawid militias,” said Allami Ahmat, who is also diplomatic adviser to Chadian President Idriss Deby.
The United Nations has accused the Janjawid of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, where rebels rose up in February 2003, accusing the Arab-Muslim government in Khartoum of backing ruthless militias and neglecting their region, peopled mainly by black Africans.
Chadian mediators also said an African Union (AU) team was due to leave the pan-African organisation’s Addis Ababa headquarters Friday to travel to Darfur and Khartoum.
An Arab League delegation is currently visiting Darfur to review humanitarian needs, a day after UN officials warned of a crisis of “enormous proportions” in the war-torn region, a newspaper report in Khartoum said Wednesday.