SLM Minawi urges Sudan Bashir to okay UN Darfur peacekeepers
Sept 18, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — The only Darfur rebel faction to sign up to a peace deal for the war-torn region urged Sudan’s ruling party Monday to allow U.N. peacekeepers to replace the largely ineffective African Union force, something the ruling party has repeatedly refused to do.
The faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement, which signed up to the Darfur peace agreement in May, supports the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for U.N. peacekeepers to replace the understaffed AU troops, whose mandate ends Sept. 30, said the rebel faction’s spokesman Mahjub Hussein.
“We welcome the resolution and support it as a guarantee to the protection of our civilian people in Darfur,” Hussein told reporters.
The ruling National Congress Party and its leader, President Omar al-Bashir, have rejected U.N. peacekeepers saying the deployment of international troops would infringe the country’s sovereignty and instead has offered to send government troops to Darfur. Critics say such troops would escalate violence in the region.
Hussein said the rebel faction rejects the ruling party’s justifications for calling U.N. peacekeeping deployment “sovereignty infringement and foreign invasion.”
The SLM faction, which is headed by former rebel leader, Minni Minnawi, is the second group to voice support for U.N. troops over the past few days. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement – a former southern rebel group that now shares power in Khartoum – also urged al-Bashir to allow international troops to deploy in Darfur.
Minnawi was sworn in last month in Khartoum as an assistant to al-Bashir, a post that also would eventually make him the head of a semiautonomous government in Darfur under the May peace deal.
The Darfur conflict began in early 2003, when ethnic African tribes revolted against the Khartoum government, which was accused of unleashing Arab militiamen blamed for rapes and killings. At least 200,000 people have died and more than 2 million people have been displaced.
The May peace agreement hasn’t halted the violence, which aid workers and rights groups say has increased in recent months.
(AP/ST)