Mediators have 7 weeks to convince rebels to attend Darfur talks
September 7, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — With new peace talks to end the Darfur conflict set to start Oct. 27 in Libya, the United Nations and the African Union have just seven weeks to convince major rebel factions to attend, a tough job because a key rebel leader immediately rejected any negotiations until there is a cease-fire.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir announced the date and venue for the talks in a joint communique on Thursday after a meeting that began with a bear hug, a sign of the close personal relationship that has developed between the two leaders and has helped propel peace efforts in Darfur.
After a whirlwind four-day visit to Sudan, including a visit to a camp for displaced people in Darfur, Ban flies to neighboring Chad early Friday for talks with President Idriss Deby on the spillover of the Darfur conflict, and then to Libya for the weekend. That visit takes on added importance with the announcement that it will host the open-ended negotiations.
The new negotiations follow a U.N. and AU conference in Arusha, Tanzania, in early August which brought Darfur rebels together to agree on a “common platform” for talks on issues such as power- and wealth-sharing, security, land and humanitarian issues. Many rebel leaders came, but there was one important holdout, Abdel Wahid Nur, who leads a major faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement. He immediately rejected the Libya talks.
“We want a cessation of hostilities and U.N. troops on the ground to stop the killing of our people before negotiations open,” he told AP by phone from his headquarters in Paris. “We are in complete disagreement with these new negotiations … it is a legalization of the status quo.”
For his part, Ban acknowledged Nur’s stature among the people of Darfur, many of whom chanted his name when the secretary-general visited a refugee camp on Wednesday.
“I would strongly urge him to participate in the forthcoming peace negotiation. I have discussed with many players, influential leaders, to exercise their influence and convince him to participate,” he said.
Despite Nur’s rejection, Ban will almost certainly continue those efforts, and U.N. officials believe they may have some leverage to get him to the peace table.
Sudan’s Foreign Minister Lam Akol also expressed hope that “all the factions will turn up to these talks so that we could have a final solution to this problem.”
“The political process is the key to the solution of the problem, because all sides are convinced that there can never be a military victory,” he said.
“My advice to Abdelwahid is that great leaders in history are the ones who take the right decision at the right time. A decision taken out of the right time is no decision, and will never be useful to the person who takes it,” Akol said.
Khalil Ibrahim, the head of the Justice and Equality Movement rebel group known as JEM, was quick to support the new talks.
“We are ready for new peace negotiations, we have set our agenda,” he told The Associated Press on the telephone from Darfur, where his group has been spearheading a recent surge of attacks against government forces. Ibrahim said his troops would not cease hostilities during the new peace talks, as Ban wanted.
JEM does not want to repeat “the mistakes” of the last round of negotiations in Abuja, Nigeria, during which most rebels said they had agreed to a truce without obtaining security commitments from the Sudanese government, Ibrahim said.
The Abuja talks led to the Darfur Peace Agreement, which was signed in May 2006 by only one of Darfur’s several splintered rebel factions. JEM and other groups rejected the deal, calling for the U.N. to mediate a new one instead.
Akol said there were six possible venues for the talks and all were acceptable to Sudan.
Ban said he and AU Commission Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare decided after consulting the government and rebel groups that Tripoli could be “a good place” for peace talks.
“The Libyan government has been playing very constructive role,” Ban said, noting that it has hosted two meetings of Libyan rebel groups.
Akol said the cooperation between the U.N., the AU and the Sudanese government “is new and it is very important.”
That cooperation was key in forging an agreement between the U.N., the AU and Sudan for the deployment of a 26,000-strong AU-U.N. peacekeeping force for Darfur, even though there is no peace to keep at the moment.
Akol said al-Bashir and Ban discussed at length how to speed up the deployment of the force.
In the joint communique, Sudan pledged “to facilitate the timely deployment” of the troops, and Akol said in response to a question that it was not essential that they all be from Africa. The resolution authorizing the force calls for it to be predominantly African, as Sudan demanded.
Ban has stressed in every speech in Sudan the importance of support from its neighbors to end the Darfur conflict especially Chad, which borders the vast western region.
Ban said last week he will discuss with Deby a Security Council statement adopted in late August giving the European Union and the U.N. approval to prepare for a new deployment to help protect civilians in both Chad and the Central African Republic.
The EU is considering deploying up to 3,000 troops and the U.N. up to 300 international police to help protect some 400,000 refugees and internally displaced people in Chad, and more than 200,000 displaced people in northern Central African Republic. The troops would be deployed in camps for refugees and major towns, not along the lengthy border, which would require a much larger force.
(AP)