W. Sudan rebels request peace talks move
By Nima Elbagir
KHARTOUM, April 26 (Reuters) – Rebels from Sudan’s troubled west requested that peace talks be moved from Chad, saying President Idriss Deby was not an impartial mediator, a statement sent to Reuters Monday said.
Two rebel groups launched a revolt in Darfur last year, accusing the Khartoum government of neglect and arming Arab militias to loot and burn African villages. U.N. officials have described the conflict as ethnic cleansing.
One rebel group, Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), reaffirmed its commitment to a truce signed earlier this month, but accused Chad of not giving visas to members of its delegation and refusing to insert amendments agreed during negotiations on the cease-fire agreement.
Chad rather produced the document in line with Khartoum’s wishes, JEM said.
“The Justice and Equality Movement considers that it is totally useless…to resume the talks in a country with such connections with its political enemy, the regime in Khartoum,” JEM said, referring to Chad.
Chadian officials were not immediately available to comment.
In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said he had urged his Sudanese counterpart Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail to facilitate the delivery of aid for the people of Darfur.
“The situation in Darfur is very bad. We have tens upon tens of thousands of people who are suffering. The rainy season will come in a few weeks, and we’ve got to get aid into them before that and bring this tragedy to an end before it gets any worse,” he said.
Powell said he also asked the minister to try “to see if we can come up with the comprehensive agreement that we’ve been working hard for, working on for so many months and which we’re closer and closer to, but we never quite get to the end of the game. And I hope that we can see some more progress on that in the next several days.”
CHAD AS MEDIATOR
Chad borders Darfur and more than 100,000 refugees fleeing the fighting have crossed the border into Chad. President Deby is also of the same tribe as some of the African rebels.
But a Western diplomat who was present at the earlier cease-fire talks agreed Chad was not an impartial mediator.
“There was a general consensus among the internationals present that there was a definite Chadian bias toward the Sudanese government,” he said on condition of anonymity.
“There were different incidents in which the internationals had to exert a great deal of effort to stop the Chadians taking steps that would benefit the Sudanese government,” he said, but declined to go into details.
A member of the government delegation said the talks in the Chadian capital N’Djamena had taken a break while Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir visited arid Darfur.
“The (peace talks) delegation has flown back and is now in al-Fashir,” said Mohamed Yousif Abdalla, state minister for humanitarian affairs, referring to the capital of Northern Darfur state. “We are awaiting the arrival of President Bashir.”
Abdalla said the talks would reconvene once a preparatory committee is set up for a proposed conference encompassing all groups in Darfur, but did not give further details.