Sudan failing on promise to remove militias-rebels

By Nima Elbagir

KHARTOUM, July 7 (Reuters) – Arab militiamen blamed for driving more than one million Africans from their homes in Sudan’s Darfur region are being put into police uniforms to patrol refugee areas, a rebel official said on Wednesday.

Khartoum has pledged to disarm the Janjaweed militia, which some U.S. officials have accused of carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and remove them from areas near refugee camps.

They have also promised to provide a “credible” police force in the border areas between Sudan and Chad, where tens of thousands of civilians have fled.

“They (the government) have put police uniforms on Janjaweed and they are sending them in to the displaced areas,” a spokesman for the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), Abu Bakr Hamid al-Nur, told Reuters by telephone from Darfur.

JEM is one of two rebel groups in the Darfur region which began a revolt last year accusing the government of neglecting the poor region and arming the Janjaweed, a charge Khartoum denies.

JEM Secretary-General Baher Eldin Idris cast doubt on whether the group would attend African Union-mediated peace talks in Ethiopia on July 15. Sudan agreed this week to attend the talks.

Idris told Reuters by telephone from Darfur that his group did not consider Ethiopia neutral enough to hold talks.

“Addis (Ababa) … has security agreements with Sudan; we want an impartial country, he said. “We will go to the talks if they are held in an impartial country.”

The United Nations says the fighting has displaced one million people and triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Darfur last week and warned of sanctions unless Khartoum disarmed the militias and allowed aid agencies greater access.

African leaders are considering expanding the mandate of a planned AU troop deployment in Darfur that would give the troops an explicit mandate to protect the refugees, as well as AU violence monitors.