Dissident rebels say they will sign Darfur peace deal
June 2, 2006 (ADDIS ABABA) — Dissident Darfur rebels said on Friday that they would sign an African Union (AU)-mediated peace deal for the troubled western Sudanese region and urged holdouts to join them.
Despite missing a Wednesday midnight deadline to agree to the pact or face possible sanctions, they said that the AU was preparing an annex to the May 5 accord for them, and hopefully other groups, to ink in the coming days.
The rebels who claim to represent splinter factions of the two groups — a wing of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) — that have thus far rejected the deal, said that they were only interested in peace.
“We are all Darfurians, so we are calling on all the rebel leaders to come and join the peace process to stop the suffering,” Abdelmajid Hassan of the JEM-Aburisha faction told reporters at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa.
“We are separated, but we are all Darfurians, so we appeal to the leaders [of the main JEM faction] to sign the peace agreement,” said Abdulrahim Adam Abdurahim Aburisha. “We hope they will change their minds.”
So far, only the main SLM faction has signed the peace agreement with the other rebels refusing to append their signatures, arguing that the agreement falls well short of addressing their demands.
But Issa Mohamed Adam Basi, a political advisor to the holdout SLM faction led by Abdelwahid Mohamed Al Nur, urged his superiors to drop their objections for the good of the people of Darfur.
“We are not against our leaders’ opinion, but we call on them to sign,” he said. “If they don’t sign, we are ready to sign as a faction as soon as the AU sets a date.”
The peace agreement is aimed at ending three years of civil conflict in the western region of Sudan that has left some 300,000 people dead, according to some estimates, and 2.4 million homeless.
On Thursday the AU expressed “deep regret” at the failure of the holdouts to meet the deadline set for signing the deal but said that it was working on modalities to allow willing parties to associate themselves with the peace pact.
The pan-African body also warned groups that continue to reject the accord are still bound by a shaky ceasefire agreement that AU peacekeepers now in the region would rigorously enforce.
(ST/AFP)