Sudan rebuffs Annan warning over Darfur conflict
By Nima Elbagir
KHARTOUM, April 7 (Reuters) – Sudan rejected outside military help on Wednesday after U.N. chief Kofi Annan warned it may be needed to halt “ethnic cleansing” in the country’s troubled western Darfur region.
But Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail welcomed offers of aid for the region, where the United Nations is warning of a humanitarian crisis caused by a conflict it says has affected one million people.
Annan said humanitarian workers and human rights experts needed to be given full access to Darfur to administer aid to hundreds of thousands of people driven from their homes, many into neighbouring Chad.
“They need to get to the victims,” he said in a speech in Geneva. “If that is denied, the international community must be prepared to take swift and appropriate action. By action in such situations, I mean a continuum of steps which may include military action.”
But Ismail told reporters in Khartoum that military help was not needed in west Sudan, where two rebel groups accuse the Khartoum government of arming Arab militias to loot and burn African villages.
“We don’t think we need outside military help and we do our best according to the available resources.”
“All that we want from the international community is that it helps us with more supplies of humanitarian aid so that we can try and help those in need,” he said.
The Sudanese government has consistently said it refuses any international involvement in the Darfur conflict, saying it is just local tribal strife.
REBELS WELCOME MILITARY HELP
The Darfur rebels said on Wednesday they would welcome any outside military intervention to quell the violence.
“We are requesting the international community like the United Nations, or the United States…just to bring forces here to protect a ceasefire, to be as an observer for what is going to be another genocide and to protect civilians,” said rebel Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) Chairman Abdel Wahed Mohamed Ahmed al-Nur.
An official from the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) said the international community had a duty to send military forces to Darfur.
“Yes of course we welcome this. Due to the conditions in Darfur, (sending troops) is the duty and responsibility of the international community because there is a disaster happening there,” Abu Bakr Hamid al-Nur told Reuters.
Two senior U.N. officials have described the killing and looting in arid Darfur as a “scorched earth” campaign and “ethnic cleansing”. Both said Khartoum had done nothing to stop the bloodshed.
“The international community cannot stand idle,” Annan said in his speech, delivered to the annual meeting of the 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission and marking the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide in which some 800,000 people died.
“The risk of genocide remains frighteningly real,” he said.
Peace talks in the Chadian capital N’Djamena witnessed a breakthrough late on Tuesday as the government for the first time held direct talks on humanitarian aid with the rebels in the presence of international observers, a key rebel demand.
The government had boycotted the opening session of the talks last Tuesday in protest at the presence of delegations from the international community such as the European Union and the United States, which initiated the talks.
(Additional reporting by Opheera McDoom in Cairo)