AU interpreter killed as UN aid chief tours Darfur

May 8, 2006 (KALMA CAMP, Darfur) — Angry demonstrators killed a Sudanese interpreter working with African Union forces in Darfur on Monday in riots that broke out during a senior UN official’s visit to a camp for displaced Sudanese.

Jan Egeland, the UN under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, said the man was killed in an African Union police station after Egeland and his entourage beat a hasty retreat from the Kalma camp in the face of violent protests.

“It turned out to be a lynching mob who entered the building the wrecked everything and they killed a Sudanese employee of the AU, an interpreter,” he told reporters traveling with him.

Egeland and aid workers had cut short their visit to the camp in South Darfur State after a demonstration by Darfuris demanding the deployment of international troops spun out of control and an aid worker was attacked.

Tensions have increased among frustrated refugees who learned details of the peace pact signed on Friday in Nigeria between the Sudanese government and the main Darfur rebel group, but rejected by two other rebel factions.

They had hoped a deal would mean an end to three years of fighting that has driven 2 million people from their homes and into squalid camps in Darfur and into Chad.

But many said they were disappointed with the deal, which they feared did not go far enough to protect them.

“This peace is not reality,” said Mohammed Jaama Sineen from Darfur’s largest tribe, the Fur.

“We are asking for international forces. We want to ask Jan Egeland to send the UN to protect us,” added the refugee who fled his home when rebels rose against the government in 2003 accusing officials in Khartoum of neglect.

Western governments have called for a UN mission to take over from the 7,000 African Union peacekeepers in Darfur. Sudan has said in the past it would only consider a UN mission in its vast west after a peace agreement.

President Bush, announcing he had directed five U.S. ships to be loaded with emergency food for Sudan, said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would ask the UN Security Council on Tuesday for a resolution speeding up deployment of UN peacekeepers to Darfur.

European Union and African Union foreign ministers, meeting in Vienna, said the peace deal should pave the way for an early agreement between the United Nations and Sudan on the UN role in Darfur.

GROWING TENSION

The Kalma camp melee began when a female refugee shouted that an aid worker was a member of the Janjaweed militia blamed for atrocities in Darfur.

Women wearing brightly colored robes and men in white jalabiyyas gathered around shouting “Janjaweed, Janjaweed” then attacked a UN vehicle with axes, stones and sticks, shattering its windows.

One man tried to stab a Sudanese aid worker for the British charity Oxfam, who was beaten as he scrambled into the car while others tried to hold off the angry crowd.

Oxfam country director Caroline Nursey said the man was a trusted long-term worker for the organization and the crowd had misunderstood something he said.

Egeland said violence targeting the AU was repeated in other camps in West Darfur on Monday. He urged calm saying people had to realize the 7,000-strong AU force was there to help.

“The African Union is really doing an heroic effort to help provide security … but it’s very clear that they’re not well-enough resourced nor do they have a mandate or presence that can avoid such terrible things from happening,” he said.

“An aid worker being attacked … also shows how much this is now a powder keg.”

The main faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), led by Minni Arcua Minnawi, signed the peace agreement in the Nigerian capital Abuja. But a rival faction, led by Abdel Wahed Mohammed al-Nur, rejected it along with a second Darfur rebel group.

Minnawi is from the smaller Zaghawa tribe but is militarily stronger than Nur, who, like many of those in the camps visited by Egeland on Monday, is from the Fur tribe.

“They (the government) want us to go home but we will not go back until Abdel Wahed himself comes to Kalma to tell us there is peace,” said another Fur tribesman, Abdul Shafie Arba Hassan, who fled his home for the camp three years ago.

(Reuters)