Sudan says ready to talk peace with Darfur rebels
By Tom Perry
CAIRO, Jan 13 (Reuters) – The Sudanese government will resume peace talks with rebels from the country’s west whenever the rebels are ready and has not set any conditions for renewed negotiations, Sudan’s interior minister said on Tuesday.
Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein also played down the size of the rebellion, which began in February in Sudan’s remote Darfur province, and said the rebels had not captured any territory.
“Whenever (the rebels) are ready to talk, we are ready to talk to them,” Hussein told Reuters in an interview in Cairo. “We have no conditions at all,” he said.
Khartoum is currently negotiating an end to two decades of civil war with a different group of southern rebels.
The rebel Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A), which accuses the government of marginalising Darfur, said last week it too wanted talks with Khartoum but on condition it allow international observers to monitor the negotiations.
Hussein did not say if Khartoum would accept that condition.
An earlier round of Darfur peace talks collapsed in December with the parties blaming each other for the failure. The Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), another Darfur rebel group, was not a party to the talks or to a previous truce between the sides.
The SLM/A’s negotiation terms also included the establishment of a team to investigate charges of civilian targeting and humanitarian aid access to rebel-held areas.
But Hussein said they did not hold any territory: “(The rebels) have no held areas. They are just gangs. They attack a place, steal everything they want and then leave.”
The rebel groups were only active in three of Darfur’s 23 provinces, he added. “They don’t represent Darfur,” he said.
The World Food Programme said in a report on Tuesday the conflict had displaced about one million people in Darfur’s three states and about 95,000 had crossed the border into Chad. It added 30,000 people fled the troubles in December alone.
Hussein blamed the migration on attacks by the rebels, who he said numbered about 2,000. Claims of attacks in Darfur are difficult to verify independently. The rebels say they are under attack from government forces and state-backed militia.
Hussein dismissed rebel accusations that the dry and arid Darfur region had been neglected by Khartoum. Water supply was one of things that had improved over the decade, he said.
“There was not a single university in Darfur. Now they have three. There were 27,000 students in schools. Now it is more than 440,000. There was not a single airport. Now they have three,” he said.
Washington has said it would consider removing Sudan from its list of “state sponsors of terrorism” if a peace deal is reached between the government and the southern rebels of the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA).
But Washington has also said Khartoum has yet to meet its demand to shut down the Khartoum offices of Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Hussein said Islamic Jihad had no presence in Sudan and the government had no intention of shutting down what he said was a Hamas information office.
“We think they are a group of freedom fighters,” he said.