Inaugural meeting of Darfur ceasefire commission delayed

ADDIS ABABA, May 21 (AFP) — The inaugural meeting of a key commission mandated to oversee a humanitarian ceasefire in the war-ravaged region of Darfur in western Sudan, where a major famine is looming, has been postponed, the African Union (AU) said Friday.

The commission, in which the AU will play a leading role, was meant to hold its first meeting in Addis Ababa this weekend.

“We were supposed to set in motion a ceasefire commission to observe the (April 8) ceasefire agreement in Darfur. However representatives of the rebel groups were unable to make it to Ethiopia due to logistical problems, as they put it,” AU Peace and Security Commissioner Said Djinit told a news conference in Addis Ababa.

“We are now postponing the meeting to May 26 and 27,” he added.

The UN has described the situation in Darfur, where rebels rose up against the Khartoum government in February 2003, as the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis.

Some 10,000 people are estimated to have been killed, two million adversely affected by the conflict, at least a million displaced from their homes and of these about 120,000 have fled across the border with Chad.

Khartoum has been roundly lambasted by the UN and human rights organisations for coopting militia forces who stand accused of committing widespread human rights abuses, including killing, ethnic cleansing, rape and forced displacement.

On Thursday, the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres warned that the region’s entire population, some six million people, was “teetering on the verge of mass starvation” because crops had not been sown this year and emergency food stocks had not been preposition ahead of rains due later this month.

Both the rebels and the Khartoum government have accused one another of violating the ceasefire.

Djinnit told the news conference that since AU observers had yet to deploy in Darfur, he was not in a postion to verify such claims.