Sudan files protest with UN, AU over rebel attack
July 4, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — The Sudanese government officially protested to the U.N. Security council, the African Union and the Arab League over a rebel attack on a town in the western region of Kordofan that killed at least a dozen people, the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.
Rebel groups opposed to a peace agreement signed to end violence in the neighboring Darfur region of Sudan undertook a raid on the town Hamarat Sheikh on Monday, killing civilians and police officials, the Sudanese army said.
“The attack on the town was carried out by a Darfur rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement. Most of the civilians in the town have fled the area to save their lives,” army spokesman Brig. Osman Mohamed al-Aghbash said.
A spokesman for the JEM claimed his group had acted in self-defense.
“The aggression was on our people, we just want to defend ourselves because within recent days there was an attack carried out by the Sudanese army … our people were thrown out of their homes in Darfur,” JEM spokesman Ahmed Hussein told the Al-Jazeera satellite TV channel by telephone from London.
Sudan’s Foreign Ministry also said Tuesday that JEM and several dissident groups from the Sudan Liberation Movement – that endorsed the May 5 Darfur Peace Agreement with Khartoum – had “conceded to having committed this heinous crime against their homeland.”
The ministry said authorities had launched security measures and appealed to the international community “in a bid to protect the lives of civilians and to safeguard the Peace Agreement itself against such plots.”
While stemming from Darfur, JEM is viewed as a movement with national ambitions and alleged ties to radical Muslim politicians in Khartoum. It has also joined a separate rebellion to the East of Sudan, and has bases in Eritrea.
The Sudanese foreign ministry implicitly warned its neighbors – Eritrea to the southeast and Chad to the west – against supporting Darfur rebels.
Sudan “should not be expected to remain an easy target for saboteurs, traitors and conspirators who hired themselves to loss-making foreign agendas,” the statement said.
SLM leader Minni Minnawi, who signed the Darfur peace deal, has also alleged that splinter SLM factions opposed to the agreement have recently received support from Chad.
Authorities said they were chasing the rebel troops into the desert Tuesday, but other reports indicated that sporadic fighting continued to erupt around Hamarat Sheikh, a town that lies roughly halfway between El Fasher, the capital of the remote Darfur region, and Khartoum, the Sudanese capital.
An eyewitness who talked on conditions of anonymity for fear of reprisals told The Associated Press on Monday that he saw a group of rebels attacking the town in more than 50 cars.
“They began by occupying government building and making much noise … then we heard shootings,” the witness said. “Then, they confiscated all trucks and cars belonging to private citizens and to the government,” he said.
The region’s governor, Faisal Hassan Ibrahim, told local media on Monday that 10 police officers and several civilians were killed in the raid.
The governor, who had fled the town, confirmed eyewitness reports that rebels destroyed almost every government building in the zone.
Located some 400 kilometers (248.56 miles) west of Khartoum, Hamarat Sheikh is a desert town inhabited mostly by Arab tribal groups that mainly trade camels and food with neighboring Libya and Egypt. The spokesman for the North Kordofan region said that a state of general mobilization had been declared there.
Nearly 200,000 people have been killed and over 2 million displaced in Darfur – a vast, arid region located between Kordofan and Chad – since members of ethnic African tribes rose in revolt against the Arab-led Khartoum government in early 2003. Sudan’s government is accused of responding by unleashing the Arab-led janjaweed militias, which have been blamed for most atrocities.
Khartoum denies this, but agreed in the peace agreement to disarm the janjaweed as a preliminary condition for rebels to disarm.
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir refuses to allow U.N. peacekeepers to be deployed in Darfur to replace a 7,000-strong African Union force that has largely failed to end violence there.
(ST/AP)