Sudan pushes for Darfur peace talks, ceasefire-envoy
May 24, 2007 (NEW YORK) — Sudan’s government is willing to meet rebel groups from Darfur anywhere, any time and would commit to a unilateral cease-fire while peace talks are held, Khartoum’s ambassador to the United Nations said on Thursday.
Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem told a Reuters Newsmakers panel there were now up to 19 rebel groups in Darfur and urged the international community to unite them.
“I can assure you that the government will observe unilaterally a cease-fire, cessation of hostilities, today if they come to the negotiating table,” Abdalhaleem said.
Only one rebel faction signed an initial Darfur Peace Agreement with Khartoum last year.
“We want to sit today with the non-signatories in any place, whether it’s South Sudan, in Addis Abba, in Eritrea or in Libya,” he said. “We want without any delay for there groups to unite or at least to come to the negotiating tables.”
The United Nations and the African Union are organizing peace talks. But it is expected to be months before an initial dialogue is underway, much less an agreement, thus bolstering calls for a robust peacekeeping force in the interim.
More than 200,000 people are estimated to have died and 2 million chased from their homes in the four-year-old conflict in western Sudan between ethnic African rebels and the government, backed by the Arab Janjaweed militia. However, over the last year rebel groups have been fighting each other.
Abdalhaleem disputed the death figure, saying the toll was between 9,000 and 10,000. The United States has said the conflict is a genocide, but Khartoum has denied this.
“For many forces in the United States the issue is not Darfur, the issue is regime change,” he said. “So please don’t deceive people and tell that you are very passionate and very concerned about Darfur.”
NO PEACE TO KEEP
But Lauren Landis, the U.S. State Department’s senior envoy to Sudan and a member of the panel, said a regime change was “furthest from our mind,” adding that Washington would likely announce new sanctions soon against Khartoum if the country does not agree to accept a large force of U.N. peacekeepers.
The U.N. Security Council last year adopted a resolution to deploy a “hybrid” U.N.-African Union force of more than 20,000. But Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has argued that this figure is too high. He has agreed to the deployment of 3,000 U.N. police and military personnel to aid the African Union force of about 7,000.
“In order to have peace in Darfur we need a ‘hybrid’ agreement,” Landis said.
The panel, held at the New York Historical Society, also included actress Mia Farrow, NBC television journalist Ann Curry and John Prendergast, an International Crisis Group senior adviser.
A frustrated United States and Britain are considering international sanctions in the U.N. Security Council, which would have a wider impact, including imposing an arms embargo on all of Sudan and financial and travel bans on individuals.
“We should start imposing sanctions,” said Prendergast. “We have a monumental opportunity staring us in the face right now to finally build the leverage to get the protection for the people and to get a real peace deal for Darfur.”
An angry Abdalhaleem accused the Brussels-based International Crisis Group think tank of being “one of the most destabilizing elements in current world politics and especially in out part of Africa.”
Prendergast laughed off the comment and accused Khartoum of arming some of the rebels in a “divide and conquer” strategy Chad and Eritrea provided guns to other armed groups.
(Reuters)