Western rebels resume fighting “to prove” they still hold Darfur
LIBREVILLE, Feb 12 (AFP) — Rebels in Sudan’s Darfur region said they staged a major offensive against government forces to dispute Khartoum’s claims that the army has crushed their revolt in the desert area.
A spokesman for the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) said that the rebels had retaken several towns and road links from government forces after President Omar al-Beshir said Khartoum now controlled the western Darfur region.
“We have resumed fighting to prove to the Sudanese government that the statements by its president are completely false,” JEM spokesman Abdallah Abdel-Kerim told AFP in Libreville via a satellite phone link.
“We occupy the vast majority of Darfur. The access routes leading to its three capitals are under our control,” he added.
Abdel-Kerim said that forces from JEM and the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) — the region’s largest rebel group — had reoccupied seven towns in the region.
The rebel spokesman had the day earlier dismissed a statement from the presidency that “military operations have ended in Darfur and government forces control the operations theatre.”
The government continued to maintain on Thursday that it had seized control of Darfur, with its refugee commissioner visiting the Chadian capital Ndjamena to inform the authorities there of the “cessation of hostilities in Darfur”.
The commissioner, Mohamed Ahmed El-Aghbash, said that the two countries were also now looking at repatriating back to Sudan refugees who fled the fighting in Darfur and sought sanctuary on the Chadian side of the border.
Some 3,000 people have been killed and another 670,000 displaced within Sudan itself by the war pitting government troops and their Arab militia allies against rebels drawn mainly from the region’s non-Arab minorities.
Another 100,000 Sudanese are estimated to have fled across the border into Chad because of the rebellion that erupted a year ago over the Darfur region’s alleged economic neglect by the government.
Late last month, the Sudanese army announced it had taken control of a number of districts on the border with Chad, including the divided town of Tine, sparking a fresh exodus of refugees across the frontier.
Fighting intensified after the failure of negotiations in Ndjamena in December, and Chad’s president Idriss Deby announced late last month that he was going to resume mediation efforts.
Chad has repeatedly intervened as a mediator in the crisis, securing two earlier ceasefires that subsequently collapsed.
But Abdel-Kerim said his group did not want any more mediation from Chad, which he accused of allowing Sudanese government forces into its territory to hit back at rebel positions.
“We do not want it (mediation) from Ndjamena as the Chad government authorises access to its airspace and territory by the Sudanese army,” he said.