UN envoy slams Darfur rebels position in Abuja talks

Jan 23, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — The UN special representative in Sudan, Jan Pronk, was for the first time very critical to the position of the rebels groups in the peace talks with the Sudanese government.

Pronk called in a news press held yesterday for a quick resumption of serious peace talks in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, between the Government of Sudan and rebel movements. He suggests February as deadline for the end of the negotiations.

According to the UN news Service, Pronk voiced concern about the rebels groups, which still have not made the choice between fighting and talking, especially the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) headed by Minni Minawi,.

“He has to be in Abuja – not in Chad, not in Libya, but in Abuja to talk in order to get agreement. If not, I think that means he is not so serious in terms of negotiation on behalf of the 2 million people who are in the camps and the others who are still in the villages being attacked by militias. So my plea is strongly made to them.”

“I have no reason to believe that the Government would not be interested. I think that the Government will be interested in getting a peace agreement soon. And they have been to Abuja,” he said.

The UN envoy said he had been to the Abuja talks often “and the Government negotiated quite constructively. They were good, tough negotiators but constructive.”

The Darfur conflict erupted in early 2003 when JEM and SLM/A took up arms against Khartoum to end what they call the neglect and oppression of the mainly black inhabitants of Darfur, a semi-desert region the size of France. The Sudanese government responded by backing Arab militias known as the Janjawid.

The uprising was brutally repressed by the government and its proxy militias known as the Janjaweed. The combined effect of war and one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises left some 300,000 people dead and 2.4 million displaced.

The envoy noted that the Government was supporting the Janjaweed in 2003 and the beginning of 2004. Since the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) was deployed in the middle of 2004, however, he said, “I have no evidence that that continues.”

But he added that UNMIS had no mandate to monitor that situation and the African Union’s reports on its mission’s (AMIS) monitoring activities were to be discussed by the Joint Committee on the Ceasefire.

“But the Joint Committee is not meeting, so we are in a vicious circle at the moment,” Pronk observed.

The UNMIS strategy in the East has been to organize talks, he said, and may have to ask the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which has signed a Comprehensive Peace Agreement, to help with talks in the east and in Darfur, however painful the process after decades of war.

“Peace is not a commodity which can be imported. It is a commodity which has to be locally produced,” he said.

(ST)