Sudan offers west rebels safe passage to talks

By Opheera McDoom

KHARTOUM, Feb 19 (Reuters) – The Sudanese government has offered safe passage to rebels from the western Darfur region so they can attend a conference in the capital on ending their year-old insurgency, the interior minister said on Thursday.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has proposed a conference in Khartoum for all Darfur leaders, including the rebels, to be chaired by Chadian President Idriss Deby in the coming days.

Interior Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein told Reuters in an interview all the Darfur tribal represenatives had agreed to attend the conference, the outcome of which the government has said it would stand by no matter what.

“We will give them security. Khalil Ibrahim, he can come and say whatever he wants and still we will take him straight back secure wherever he wants to go,” Hussein said, referring to the Europe-based leader of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement.

Two main rebel groups took up arms in the arid west of the budding oil-producer last year accusing the government of neglecting the poor area and arming nomadic Arab militias to loot and burn African villages.

U.N. officials have estimated up to one million people have been displaced by the conflict in Darfur so far, with more than 100,000 refugees in neighbouring Chad. They also warned of a humanitarian crisis if more access to those fleeing the violence was not granted.

“When they say there is one million, that is just rubbish because there are not that many people there. The fighting is only in a small area,” Hussein said.

“There are never 100,000 refugees there (in Chad). The president told me there are only 18,000,” he said, adding the rest were likely either Chadians from the same tribe or nomads.

U.N. envoy Tom Eric Vraalsen said on Thursday some progress had been made with the government in access talks.

Hussein said Sudan’s armed forces and police had recovered all the areas once held by rebels and that the people of Darfur did not support the rebels, who he said were mostly from one African tribe, out of about 23 tribes in the region.

“They (the rebels) are not controlling any land. They have lost everything,” he said.

In re-establishing control over these areas, he said the government used helicopter gunships in the fighting. He denied rebel charges the government used Antonov planes to bomb civilians and villages.

Hussein said Sudan had information Eritrea had given military training to some rebels and Islamist opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi was offering political support, with Turabi party members among the rebel leaders.

He also said the Darfur rebels were armed by the main rebel group in the south, which is currently negotiating in Kenya a peace deal with Khartoum to end more than two decades of civil war in the south of Africa’s largest country.

The southern conflict, which has killed more than two million people, broadly pits the Arab and Muslim north against the mainly Christian and animist south, complicated by oil, ethnicity and ideology.

Sudan says it expects the current round of talks, which began on Tuesday, to yield a peace agreement.