West Sudan rebel group to withdraw from peace talks

By Nima Elbagir

CAIRO, April 2 (Reuters) – A rebel group in western Sudan said on Friday it planned to withdraw from peace talks with the Khartoum government intended to end more than a year of conflict.

In a statement sent to Reuters, the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) said Chadian authorities had declined to grant its political delegation entry visas to join the talks in the Chadian capital N’Djamena.

“This withdrawal will be effective from…Monday April 5,” said the statement, signed by JEM spokesman Idris Ibrahim Azraq.

JEM is one of two rebel groups that launched a revolt in the remote Darfur region in February last year, accusing Khartoum of neglecting the poor area bordering Chad and arming Arab militias to loot and burn African villages.

A U.N. official recently likened the Darfur conflict to the 1994 Rwandan genocide and said the fighting had created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.

JEM said it was “reluctantly” withdrawing from the talks.

“JEM…strongly urges the peace mediators to seek a substitute avenue for the peace talks where all parties will be enabled to attend and participate in the talks without obstruction,” the statement said.

Sudanese government officials were not immediately available for comment on the withdrawal.

The government delegation had boycotted the opening session of the talks, launched at the initiative of the United States and the European Union, in protest at the presence of international observers.

Indirect talks have since begun but without the mediation by the international observers that is a key rebel demand.

PEACE TALKS TO CONTINUE

The other rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), said it was not aware of JEM’s withdrawal and would continue to try to push the talks forward:

“We’re going to continue until we cannot move forward anymore,” SLM leader Minni Arcua Minnawi told Reuters from N’Djamena. “…but we came here on the basis that it was a joint initiative from the EU and the States. We will not accept the withdrawal of the (international) observers.”

A U.N. spokesman said on Friday the United Nations planned to send a fact-finding mission to Darfur in the coming days to probe allegations of rights abuses.

A western diplomat in Khartoum said he did not believe the government wanted to negotiate with JEM anyway because of its links to Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi’s Popular Congress party, loosely linked this week to an attempted coup plot.

“It feels that it can resolve this issue in Darfur by negotiating with the SLM (alone),” he said.

Talks between the government and the SLM collapsed last December, with both sides blaming each other.

The United Nations estimates that more than one million people are affected by the Darfur conflict, with about 100,000 refugees living in tents in Chad. (Additional reporting by Opheera McDoom in Cairo)