Sudan says more than 30 police killed in Darfur

By Opheera McDoom

KHARTOUM, Nov 23 (Reuters) – Sudan said on Tuesday clashes with rebels in its Darfur region had killed more than 30 policemen, and denied accusations from aid workers that government planes had bombed a town captured by the rebels.

Sudan Liberation Army rebels gather near a base in the desert east of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state November 8, 2004. (Reuters).

Rebels attacked and seized the town of Tawilla in North Darfur state on Monday, and officials said fighting was continuing as police and army struggled to regain control over the town, where about 30,000 refugees are encamped.

The Save the Children UK organisation said about 30 of its workers were forced to flee on foot when a bomb landed about 50 metres (yards) from one of its feeding centres in the town.

Rebel commanders in North Darfur also said the town had been bombed, but Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail denied this.

“There are clear instructions to the army that they should not use any bombing. There is no bombing,” he told reporters in Khartoum. But he added helicopter gunships may have been used.

Sudan’s security chief has said rebels have used villages in Darfur as human shields attracting government bombardment throughout their uprising.

The top U.N. envoy in Sudan, Jan Pronk, said the rebel attack on Tawilla was a clear violation of the protocols signed earlier this month in the Nigerian capital Abuja between rebels and the government, and expressed concern that the violence had stopped humanitarian operations around the capital of North Darfur state El Fasher.

“The parties have committed themselves to refrain from all hostilities and military actions,” he said in a statement “I fully expect them to live up to their obligations.

After years of skirmishes between Arab nomads and mostly non-Arab farmers over scarce resources in arid Darfur, rebels took up arms early last year accusing the government of neglect and of arming Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, to loot and burn non-Arab villages. Khartoum denies the charge.

The United Nations says the violence has caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with more than 1.6 million people forced from their homes in the remote western area.

Saying the rebels had killed more than 30 policemen over the past two days, Ismail lamented the silence of the international community in the face of what he described as the rebels’ violations of a shaky ceasefire signed in April.

He said the government had the right to self-defence.

“It is clear that the principle of self-defence is the defence of civilians, and the possessions lost by the civilians and also the defence of governmental organisations who have been attacked,” the minister said.

He accused unspecified aid groups of siding with the rebels by not criticising their attacks.

The United Nations has threatened Sudan with possible sanctions if it fails to stop the violence in Darfur, which the United States has dubbed genocide.

While there are no reliable figures for the number of killed by the fighting, the World Health Organisation estimates more than 70,000 have died since March from malnutrition and disease.