Military confrontation is continuing in western Sudan : MP

By Alfred Taban

KHARTOUM, Feb 23 (Reuters) – A member of the European parliament said on Monday there was little sign military operations had been halted in oil-producer Sudan’s poor western Darfur region, despite government assurances to the contrary.

“There is direct evidence that military confrontation is continuing. The Islamist militia, the Janjaweed are running riot in most of the countryside,” said Richard Howitt, referring to the nomadic Arab militia that rebels say the government arms.

Howitt, a British member of the European Parliament, was speaking after visiting towns in remote Darfur, where two main rebel groups took up arms against Khartoum a year ago.

Aid organisations say one million people have been displaced by the fighting, many fleeing to neighbouring Chad.

Howitt said the humanitarian situation in Darfur was a “deep and dismal disaster” and accused the Sudanese government of preventing journalists from going to the region to “hide this conflict from the world”.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said earlier this month government troops had crushed the Darfur rebellion. But rebels in the arid west of the country dispute the claim. They accuse the government of neglecting the area and arming nomadic Arab militias to loot and burn African villages.

Khartoum denies supporting the Janjaweed, but Howitt said: “Everybody knows the Janjaweed are working on behalf of the government which supplies them their guns and uniform and are recruited by senior government officials.”

Independent verification from the region is rare because government permits to visit are difficult to obtain.

Howitt is part of a European parliamentary delegation invited by the government to tour some of the main towns in Darfur and the south.

Howitt said aid organisations were reaching only 15 percent of those in need because of the scale of the conflict and government restrictions.

“There has been a systematic pattern of denial of travel by military intelligence,” he said.

U.N. envoy Tom Eric Vraalsen said last week access to the one million Sudanese affected by the conflict was limited although some progress was being made in talks with Khartoum.

SOUTHERN PEACE THREATENED

Howitt said unless the government entered into talks with the western rebels, peace negotiations in Kenya to end a separate, 21-year-old civil war in the south would be irrelevant.

“They cannot portray themselves as victors of peace, working through the civil war in the south…while they are conducting what has been described as ethnic cleansing in Darfur,” he said.

The civil war in the south has killed more than two million people and broadly pits the Islamist government in Khartoum against the mainly Christian, animist south, complicated by issues of oil, ethnicity and ideology.

The southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) announced on Monday it was starting its first political activities in Khartoum after forming an office there in December last year.

SPLM spokesman Ramadan Abdallah said the group was setting up students’ and women’s unions that would work in coordination with their national, northern-based counterparts.