W. Sudan rebels deny signing deal with govt

By Nima Elbagir

KHARTOUM, April 27 (Reuters) – Sudan’s government has said rebels from the troubled west have signed a deal to hold a conference to discuss the 14-month-old conflict in remote Darfur but the rebels on Tuesday denied they had come to an agreement.

A Sudan government spokesman told the official Sudanese news agency SUNA late on Monday that the rebels had signed a deal on April 25 after peace talks in the Chadian capital, N’Djamena.

“The agreement was signed yesterday (April 25) in the presence of the Chadian president…The agreement was to hold an all-Darfur collective conference to solve the problem of Darfur,” spokesman Mohamed Yousif Abdalla said.

“We also agreed to another meeting after two weeks under the auspices of the Chadian president,” Abdalla added.

But the two rebel groups that launched a revolt against Khartoum in arid Darfur in February last year said there was no new agreement and they would not attend the conference.

The rebel Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) said its delegation had withdrawn as it did not have a mandate to discuss political issues in the peace talks, but one member had remained and signed without authorisation from the movement.

“We will not attend the conference and…we will not be returning to political discussions once the political talks resume,” said SLM field commander Ahmed Adam.

He said the member who signed would return to Darfur to attend a hearing into his actions.

The other rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), said in a statement on its Web site www.sudanjem.com that it did not have a delegation in N’Djamena and that a conference would not solve the Darfur problem.

“The movement did not have a delegation in N’Djamena to negotiate with the government delegation so no one can say that there were negotations that led to any agreement with the movement there,” JEM’s statement said in Arabic.

JEM has previously accused the Chadian mediator and the government delegates of placing someone not affiliated to JEM in the group’s seat at the talks.

HUMANITARIAN CRISIS

Both groups reaffirmed their commitment to a truce signed on April 8 to allow urgent aid to about one million people affected by the conflict. U.N. officials have said it was one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with more than 110,000 refugees encamped in neighbouring Chad.

SLM foreign affairs spokesman Ahmed Abdelshafi Yagoub said the groups’ two main leaders were in the Eritrean capital Asmara, where they had met for the first time with southern rebel leader John Garang of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).

The SPLM is in talks with Khartoum to end more than two decades of civil war in the south of Africa’s largest country.

The conflict, which has claimed about two million lives, pits the Islamist northern government against the mainly Christian or animist south, complicated by issues of oil, ethnicity and ideology. Talks are stalling over the imposition of Islamic sharia law in Khartoum.

(Additional reporting by Opheera McDoom in Cairo)