Rebel JEM waiting for UN before freeing oil workers
November 6, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — A Darfur rebel group said on Tuesday it was waiting for a United Nations mission to arrive so it can free five oil workers kidnapped last month in the neighbouring Kordofan region.
“We are still waiting for the people from the UN,” said Abdelaziz el-Nur Ashr, from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).
Ashr had said on Sunday that the movement’s leader Khalil Ibrahim had ordered the five to be released at the request of the Egyptian government.
The rebels had previously made the hostages’ release conditional on their employers’ withdrawal from working with the Khartoum government to develop Sudan’s oil resources.
The JEM said on October 25 it had kidnapped the oil workers, three Sudanese, an Iraqi and an Egyptian. The five were abducted on October 23, it said, naming the two foreigners as engineers Ahmed Heyman Mohammed from Iraq and Joseph William Samuel of Egypt.
The rebel group had warned it would attack foreign oil companies and target Chinese firms in particular.
“China is the main supplier of weapons to Sudan, it has always supported the government in the UN Security Council and it hasn’t provided even a single sack of grain to the people of Darfur,” Ashr said.
The five workers were seized in an attack on a facility at Defra run by the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, a consortium involving China’s CNPC, India’s ONGC, Malaysia’s Petronas and state-owned Sudapet.
The oilfield produces more than half of the country’s output of some 500,000 barrels of oil per day, most of which is exported to China.
Beijing has often been accused of failing to exert pressure on Sudan’s President Omar al-Beshir to stop the bloodshed in Darfur, where conflict has left at least 200,000 dead and displaced more than two million, according to UN figures.
Ashr also said that UN and African Union mediators had contacted his group to convince members to join peace talks under way in the Libyan city of Sirte aimed at ending the conflict in the troubled western Sudanese region.
“Our group considers the Sirte meeting a failure because there was not enough time to prepare and those invited are not all representatives,” he said.
The Sirte talks were even branded a failure by Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi, the host, after several key rebel factions failed to attend.
Eight rebel factions, including the most important, have stayed away, casting a pall over the bid to end the slaughter.
The Khartoum government declared a unilateral ceasefire at the start of the meeting and the chief negotiators — the UN’s Taye Zerihoun and the AU’s Sam Ibok — still hope to bring the boycotting rebel factions to the table.
Only six minor rebel groups turned up in Sirte and they sent “second rank” representatives with little power, a UN diplomat acknowledged.
(AFP)