Sudanese government urged to check Arab militia attacks
KHARTOUM, Nov 9 (AFP) — Local administrators are appealing to Khartoum to intervene in Sudan’s western Darfur region to check attacks by Arab militias which have left a total of 88 people dead, a newspaper reported Sunday.
The Akhbar Al Youm daily quoted the commissioner of Zilinje district, Mohamed Nihaidh Saleh, as saying the attacks were launched earlier this week by armed Arab Janjaweed militiamen from North Darfur State.
The new attacks on villages around Zalinje raised “to 32 the number of villages hit by arson and to 88 the number of the people killed, including policemen,” he was quoted as saying.
Some 32,000 feddans (acres) of farmland have been burned.
All schools in the district have been turned into shelters for internally displaced persons who number 60,000 in Zalinje and Morni towns alone, the newspaper also reported Saleh as saying, adding that dead bodies lay in the streets.
The commissioner said he was appealing to the government in Khartoum to intervene because events had grown beyond the capabilities of the district and the state, the paper reported.
The commissioner alleged in the same newspaper Saturday that the Janjaweed were armed by the government to fight the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), which is demanding Khartoum stops neglecting the region economically.
In another development, a local tribal chieftain and three other men were abducted Saturday by gunmen at Kukul marketplace, north of Al-Fashir, the capital of North Darfur State, the independent Al-Hayat daily said.
It quoted North Darfur governor Osman Yousuf Kibir as accusing the SLM of involvement in the incident, but contacts with the SLM made him optimistic that the four would be freed.
Khartoum and West Darfur rebels agreed Tuesday to extend a Chadian-brokered ceasefire agreed in September for another 10 days while they pursue negotiations in neighboring Chad.
The government and the SLM resumed talks at Abeche in eastern Chad on October 26 in an attempt to stem a conflict that is estimated to have cost 3, 000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have streamed into Chad.