EU officials say no improvement in Darfur security

July 4, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — European parliamentarians said on Wednesday that Sudan’s troubled Darfur region had become no safer since a peace treaty was signed a year ago.

Widespread insecurity in the remote Western region was preventing any development there, the 10-member delegation from the European parliament’s development committee said following a three-day visit there.

They blamed fragmentation of rebel groups and the failure to disarm militias, some of which were being incorporated into the army, for the continued conflict.

“We have observed that today the security has not improved since the peace agreement one year ago,” delegation head Josep Borrell Fontelles told reporters, referring to a peace deal signed in 2006 by only one of three negotiating rebel groups.

“There is a general widespread insecurity due to the fragmentation of the rebel groups … due to the fact that the Janjaweed (militia) are still armed and some of them included in regular Sudanese armed forces,” he added.

“It’s almost impossible to launch a big development project,” the Spaniard said.

Sudan’s government has signed numerous deals promising to disarm the militia they mobilised to quell a revolt which began in early 2003. The revolt started when mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms accusing central government of marginalising the remote region.

International experts estimate 200,000 have died and 2.5 million been driven from their homes in Darfur. Khartoum puts the death toll at 9,000.

HYBRID FORCE

Khartoum has agreed to a joint U.N.-African Union force of at least 20,000 troops and police to take over from a struggling 7,000-strong AU peacekeeping force which has itself become a target for attacks in the lawless region.

Critics said the government gave in under threat of sanctions from the world body and the European Union. But Borrell Fontelles said the spectre of sanctions was not gone.

“Of course the sanctions cannot be excluded forever. It will depend on the developments of the events, what will happen with the hybrid force,” he said.

But he said the Europeans had a more cautious approach to sanctions than the U.S. administration which strengthened its embargo on Sudan, in place since 1997, despite Khartoum’s agreement to the joint peacekeeping force.

“We know that sometimes the sanctions hurt the civilian population,” he said, added sanctions would not be applied against the entire country.

While the EU aid commissioner Louis Michel said the period for funding the AU force had ended, the EU parliamentarians said they would recommend further cash be found to support the struggling mission until the joint force could take over, at the earliest next year.

“Of course we will recommdend that AMIS (the African Mission in Sudan) will be supported,” said Frithjof Schmidt, a German member of the delegation.

“You see that the people are desperate and they tell you that they have been driven out of their villages not a year ago but last month,” he added.

(Reuters)