Darfur rebels say won’t attend peace talks
(Adds World Food Programme workers missing, paragraphs 14,15)
By Opheera McDoom
KHARTOUM, July 2 (Reuters) – Rebels from Sudan’s west said they would not attend Chad peace talks Khartoum said were slated for Friday and accused the government of bombing their Darfur region as U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited on Thursday.
Annan saw camps for more than a million people displaced by a rebellion launched last year by African tribes accusing Khartoum of arming Arab militias known as Janjaweed to loot and burn African villages. The government denies the charge.
Minni Arcua Minnawi, Secretary-General of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), told Reuters he had not received any signal that talks were about to start and would not be attending.
A spokesman for the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) said they would not attend the talks in Chad because government forces continued to bomb areas of Darfur and Arab militias were still attacking African farming communities.
Sudan’s interior minister said on Thursday peace talks would begin in the Chadian capital N’Djamena with the Darfur rebels on Friday, after Sudan assured the United States it would speed up political negotiations to end the fighting that the United Nations says has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
“We will not go due to the violations of the ceasefire by the government,” said JEM spokesman Abu Bakr Hamid al-Nur. “We do not want Chad to mediate for the political issues because they were not fair in the humanitarian talks.”
Chad mediated a humanitarian ceasefire signed on April 8 to allow aid workers to reach those affected by the revolt in remote Darfur, which borders Chad. But both sides have since accused the other of violations.
Nur said on Thursday, as Annan was in Darfur, that government planes bombed areas near Nyala, the capital of Southern Darfur state.
Observers say in arid Darfur, roughly the size of France, Annan’s plane would not have gone anywhere near Nyala, so it would have been impossible to see the planes.
“The same day Annan was in El Fasher the government bombed around Nyala and two villages were burned by Janjaweed,” Nur told Reuters from Darfur. “They bombed from around 9 a.m. (0600 GMT) until 11 a.m. (0800 GMT),” he added. Annan’s plane landed in Darfur at around midday (0900 GMT).
He said some people were injured but he was still trying to get further details.
An armed forces statement released early this morning said they had pushed back two attacks by the rebels on Wednesday and Thursday in the same area the rebels say was bombed, near Nyala.
“This was regardless of the fact that the government has completely abided by the ceasefire agreement morally and in practice,” the statement obtained by Reuters said.
An aid community source told Reuters on Friday a manager and a truck driver contracted to work for the World Food Programme had disappeared on a road to Nyala earlier this week.
“We don’t know what happened to them and the two of them have disappeared,” the source said. The two, whose nationalities were not immediately known, were in a truck carrying World Food Programme supplies.
(Additional reporting by Nima Elbagir Khartoum and in Tom Perry in Cairo)