Darfur forum to recommend security for displaced and refugees
November 11, 2008 (KHARTOUM) – The government-initiated Forum of the People of Sudan on Darfur will recommend Wednesday to President Omar Al-Bashir a strategy for enhanced security and other measures that will allow the millions of displaced people and refugees to return to their home villages.
The final report recommends an immediate unilateral ceasefire and for the government to provide security to the home areas of people who fled from government-directed military campaigns that began in 2003 against villages in Darfur.
The policy outlined in the report represents an effort to maintain the Darfur Peace Agreement signed on May 5, 2006 by one main rebel leader, Minni Minawi, as the basis for future negotiations. The DPA was followed by a period of intense escalation of violence.
The initiative to solve Darfur conflict was announced on July 13, the eve of the day that International Criminal Court Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo sought an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir on ten counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The forum accepts the principal of individual compensation for victims of the war, but also asks that the government prioritize collective compensation by family. For this purpose, the report recommends classifying families as big and medium and small families. The policy would also dedicate funds for the construction of villages and services, instead of individual compensations. But the state’s “capability to pay compensation” will be taken into consideration with these measures.
The meeting also suggested re-establishing Darfur as one administrative region rather than three, which was one of the grievances that sparked the rebellion.
The sixty-seven pages report moreover urges that Darfur be represented by a vice-president in the national government, which already has two vice presidents.
These concessions approximate the rebel demands that Khartoum rejected at the Abuja peace negotiations mediated by the African Union in 2006, when the two main Darfur rebel groups, Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), ultimately refused to sign an agreement that did not restore Darfur to one administrative region in Darfur and dedicate a vice-presidency for the region, as well as over the issue of individual compensations.
SLM leader Abdel Wahid Al-Nur refuses to negotiate unless the displaced are returned to their villages and the security is restored.
(ST)