Peace talks between Khartoum and Darfur rebels to start next week

NDJAMENA, March 26 (AFP) — Peace talks between the Khartoum government and the main rebel group from Sudan’s troubled western Darfur region are due to start early next week, diplomats said.

The negotiations, hosted in neighbouring Chad, had been scheduled to open on Friday but were delayed after the Sudanese delegations failed to arrive in Ndjamena, according to diplomats contacted from Liberville.

Neither the Sudanese government nor rebel delegations had arrived by Friday afternoon, and a diplomat told AFP that the talks were unlikely to start before Monday or Tuesday.

But Chad officials insisted that the talks would start without major delay.

“The talks have not been postponed, this is just a slight delay as happens in such circumstances,” Ahma Allami, international relations advisor to Chad’s President Idriss Deby, told AFP.

“The talks can begin at any time, we are ready and the delegations from the European Union, the African Union, the United States and the Geneva centre for international dialogue are here already,” he added.

The Darfur conflict erupted in February 2003 between the government and rebels, which accuse it of marginalizing their region. More than 10,000 people have been killed and an estimated 670,000 forced from their homes by fighting.

The United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Sudan Mukesh Kapila earlier this month described the conflict as “the world’s greatest humanitarian and human rights catastrophe”.

Kapila said most of the atrocities were being carried out by militia groups fighting the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) rebel movement.

The conflict has intensified just as the Khartoum government and the country’s main rebel group, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, are finalising a deal to end Sudan’s wider civil war, which began in 1983.