Rival Darfur rebel leaders in Abuja for peace talks
Nov 27, 2005 (ABUJA) — Two rival leaders of a rebel movement from the Sudanese region of Darfur pledged to work together on the seventh round of peace talks with Khartoum in Nigeria, a mediator said on Sunday.
Minni Arcua Minnawi and Abdelwahed Mohamed al-Nur both claim the presidency of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the fracture in the rebel group has been one of the main problems holding back progress in the six previous rounds of talks.
“The leadership of the SLA committed themselves to go the Abuja talks with one common negotiation platform,” said a statement from Chad’s Minister of Territorial Administration General Mahamat Ali Abdallah Nassour, who chaired the N’Djamena meeting.
AU spokesman Noureddine Mezni said both rebel leaders had arrived in the Nigerian capital of Abuja and that the Sudanese government delegation was expected to arrive on Monday. He said the new round of talks are expected to start on Tuesday. They have been delayed for a week.
The two rebel leaders took part in talks in the Chadian capital N’Djamena from Thursday to Saturday, with mediators from Chad, Libya, Eritrea and the African Union working to fashion a compromise allowing the broader negotiations to move forward.
The statement said the factions had agreed to set up a joint committee to draft this common platform, and another joint committee “to consider ways and means to achieve total reconciliation of the SLA leadership”.
The African Union is the main mediator in the talks. It has 6,000 peacekeepers in Darfur, where a conflict between rebels and government-backed militias has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced more than 2 million since early 2003.
Violence, killings and rapes have escalated in the past two months despite a ceasefire, and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said on Monday that Darfur risked descending into complete lawlessness and anarchy.
Many observers are pessimistic about the new round of talks, citing rebel divisions, increasing violence, lack of sincerity on the part of the government and insufficient representation at the talks of those fighting in the field.
Against that backdrop, diplomatic efforts intensified to try and reconcile Minnawi and Nur and unify the SLA, the bigger of the two rebel groups that took up arms against Khartoum in 2003 over what they said was discrimination and neglect.
The six previous rounds of peace talks on Darfur made little headway in tackling the issues of power-sharing, wealth-sharing and security that are at the heart of the conflict.
(Reuters)