Darfur rebels need leaders at talks-AU official
By Opheera McDoom
ADDIS ABABA, July 7 (Reuters) – Darfur rebels must send their leaders to peace talks later this month to end the fighting in Sudan’s remote west that has driven 1 million people from their homes, a senior African Union official said.
Hamid Algabid, the AU commission president’s special envoy for Darfur, also said he saw peace deals to end more than two decades of civil war in Sudan’s south as a model to resolve the conflict in Sudan’s arid west.
“We would like really to discuss with the people who are really representative,” he told Reuters late on Tuesday night.
“So for the next meeting we are asking (them) to send people who are high level and who can take decisions,” he said.
Algabid has responsibility for the AU- and Chad-mediated talks due to start on July 15 in Addis Ababa.
After long conflict between Arab nomads and African farmers, two groups took up arms last year, accusing the government of arming Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, to carry out a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Khartoum denies the charges.
The United Nations says the fighting has displaced 1 million people and about 200,000 refugees are encamped in neighbouring Chad, triggering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The foes signed a shaky ceasefire in April but fighting has continued sporadically.
Infighting has split the rebels, whose leaders say they will not talk with the government without preconditions like international mediation and disarmament of the Janjaweed.
But Khartoum did hold talks with rebel representatives in N’Djamena last Friday, Algabid said, although the rebel representative from the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) was from a group that split from the main movement last month.
Sudan made written commitments to disarm the marauding Janjaweed after a visit to Darfur and neighbouring Chad by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan last week.
Diplomats in Khartoum said the United States had given Khartoum a deadline of the end of July to disarm the militias. But Algabid, an ex-prime minister from Niger, said this was an unrealistic time frame and disarming the Janjaweed would be difficult if the rebels remained armed.
Algabid also likened the rebel’s grievances to those in the Southern Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains regions, caught up in the southern civil war. The negotiations for these areas decided on a power-sharing arrangement.
“In Darfur the rebels are not asking for independence. They are talking as members of Sudan as a one and united country,” he said. “The only thing they wish is to share the power now and to share the wealth of the country.”
Algabid has eight years of peacekeeping experience at the helm of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC).
He added the AU would be very unlikely to send peacekeeping troops in addition to 300 troops being prepared to protect ceasefire monitors in Darfur, the size of France, because it would require huge numbers of forces.