Darfur rebel faction demand Jamous release
Aug 2, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — Commanders from a large Darfur rebel faction say they will not attend a U.N. and African Union unity meeting in Tanzania unless senior figure Suleiman Jamous is allowed to attend, a rebel leader said on Thursday.
Jamous, the Sudan Liberation Army’s humanitarian coordinator, has been virtually imprisoned in Kordofan, near Darfur, for 13 months after being moved to a U.N. hospital there for treatment. Khartoum says it will arrest him if he leaves.
This week 11 prominent activists including South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke, former Czech President Vaclav Havel, and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams, wrote to President Omar Hassan al-Bashir requesting his release.
Observers say he is critical as the rebel liaison with the world’s largest humanitarian operation in Darfur, which has been forced to scale down because of attacks on their convoys, leaving some 500,000 out of reach of aid.
They also say he is key to uniting fractured rebel factions and military commanders in Darfur with political leadership outside the region, one of the biggest obstacles to a peaceful settlement in Darfur.
“Our commanders on the ground are saying that unless Jamous goes to Arusha, they will not go,” one SLA faction head Abdallah Yehia told Reuters by telephone. “It is very, very important that Jamous comes,” he said.
“I told the U.N. and AU this, but they say it is difficult. I ask why is it difficult? He is in a U.N. hospital,” Yehia, from the SLA-Unity group, said. Yehia said he was travelling to Arusha in Tanzania, but that his commanders were refusing to go.
Julie Flint, co-author of a book on Darfur, said SLA-Unity was a very important group. “The so-called Unity group controls a significant swathe of North Dafur, as well as parts of eastern Darfur and south-eastern Darfur,” she said.
The United Nations was not immediately available to comment.
Sudan on Wednesday said it was ready to consider releasing Jamous, but said neither U.N. Darfur envoy Jan Eliasson nor his AU counterpart Salim Ahmed Salim had raised the issue in talks.
Eliasson and Salim are in charge of the Darfur peace process and will chair the Arusha meeting due to start on Friday. It aims to get a joint rebel negotiating platform for peace talks.
After an AU-mediated peace deal last year signed by only one of three rebel negotiating factions, the non-signatories split into more than dozen factions.
Mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing central government of neglect. Khartoum mobilised mostly Arab militias, known locally as Janjaweed, to quell the revolt.
(Reuters)