UN refugee chief launches Darfur tour with appeal for peace
GENEINA, Sudan, Sept 26 (AFP) — UN High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers appealed to Khartoum and ethnic minority rebels to set aside their differences Sunday, as he launched a tour of Sudan’s devastated western region of Darfur with an appeal for peace.
“The time has come for the parties really to sit down at the negotiating table and sort things out,” Lubbers said as he arrived in this war-wracked region where his agency says some 1.4 million people have fled their homes.
“We are not interested in political clashes, we are interested in a solution,” he told dignitaries, who included the state culture and social services minister, Habib Makhtoum.
The UN refugee chief pressed calls for greater autonomy for Darfur, where the rebels and their minority supporters complain of exploitation at the hands of the Arab-dominated regime in Khartoum.
Lubber’s host in the West Darfur state capital of Geneina, state governor Suleiman Abdullah Adam, lent official support to the proposal.
“We hope there will be more autonomy to the states. We believe this would be a solution to the problems,” he said.
Lubbers first appealed for a federal solution to Sudan’s problems during a visit to camps for Darfur refugees in neighbouring Chad last week.
In an AFP interview on August 3, Sudanese Information Minister Al-Zhawi Ibrahim Malik said his government was “ready for genuine federalism”, but Khartoum has yet to act on the idea, long canvassed by minority groups in eastern and central Sudan as well as Darfur.
After his talks in the state capital, the UN refugee chief travelled out to the one of the vast tent cities established for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in this vast region the size of France.
Lubbers toured the Riad camp, one of the smaller ones, which houses some 8,000 people.
Residents complained that, despite the protestations of Khartoum that it has reined in its bloody clampdown on the rebels, they remained prey to the depredations of state-sponsored Arab militias.
“Two nights ago, two armed men came to the camp and told us: ‘We will make you suffer until you leave Darfur’,” said Jamaal Mohammed, 42, who fled his home in Durte Mangash, about 60 kilometres (40 miles) from Geneina.
“They want to turn Sudan into an Arab country. They don’t want blacks here,” Mohammed told AFP.
Fifteen-year-old Hawai Bashir Usman, whose father went missing after a militia raid, had simpler concerns.
“For days we have nothing to eat. We get no support in the camp apart from shelter. Look my stove is unlit today,” she said in her dusty and baking tent.
Aid officials said Janjaweed militiamen were still present in the area and were preventing people from crossing over to Chad, where some 190,000 refugees have already fled.
“It’s difficult to catch them. Curfew starts at nine o’clock at night and, after that, these guys can have a field day,” one aid official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The Sudanese government insists the security situation is improving and has sought to distance itself from its proxy militias.
But an angry group of camp leaders told Lubbers of their anger at official disavowals of responsibility for the bloodshed, which UN officials say has cost up to 50,000 lives.
“Our villages were bombed by helicopters and Antonovs (Russian-designed military transport aircraft),” one camp elder said.
“The government cannot say it is not behind these people on camels (the Janjaweed).”
Despite the UN refugee chief’s calls for reconcilation, government officials renewed their tirades against the Darfur rebels, accusing them of complicity in an alleged Islamist coup attempt against the military-backed regime in Khartoum on Friday.
One of the two rebel factions — the Justice and Equality Movement — “were the military leaders of the Popular Congress”, the party of jailed Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi, the state governor charged.
“They are trying to escalate things in Darfur. They are trying to overthrow the government with international help.”