Rebels say Sudan troops kill 73 in Darfur attack
April 17, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — A Sudanese rebel group accused government troops and Janjaweed militia on Tuesday of killing 73 people in attacks on a cluster of villages in northern Darfur, an accusation the army denied.
Ibrahim al-Helu, a commander in one rebel faction of the Sudan Liberation Army, said a large number of government troops and militia had attacked 11 villages in the Sires Umm al-Qura area in northern Darfur over the past three days.
“They killed more than 73 civilians … People are fleeing the area,” he told Reuters. He said his faction, which rejected a 2006 Darfur peace deal, had engaged the attackers and fighting was still under way. The African Union was checking the report.
Helu’s report came on the same day the United States accused the Khartoum government of not doing enough to implement a shaky 2006 peace accord and urged it to admit a U.N. force of 17,000 to 20,000 peacekeepers. Sudan has previously rejected such demands.
An army spokesman said the Sudanese armed forces had no operations in the area where the violence was reported, and dismissed it as nothing more than typical tribal clashes.
“That is all false,” he said of Helu’s account. “There are no movements of soldiers in that area. The armed forces have no operations there … They are normal clashes between tribes.”
Experts say 200,000 people have been killed and more than 2.5 million displaced since the conflict in Darfur flared in 2003. Human rights groups have accused the government of arming a militia known as the Janjaweed to quell the rebellion.
Khartoum, which has denied the charge, signed a peace deal last year with one rebel group, which then splintered, contributing to instability fuelled by feuding tribes, bandits and the Janjaweed.
After months of delay, Sudan has accepted an interim plan to let 3,000 U.N. military personnel into Darfur to reinforce an African Union force of 7,000 already on the ground.
Sudan’s acceptance of the U.N. deployment is expected to put in abeyance U.S. and British plans to introduce sanctions against Khartoum. But the new force may take six months to recruit and deploy, U.N. officials say.
(Reuters)