Darfur peace bid stymied, rebels insist on terms
By Tsegaye Tadesse
ADDIS ABABA, July 17 (Reuters) – Efforts to bring Darfur’s warring parties back to the negotiating table were deadlocked on Saturday as rebels insisted for a third day they would not talk to the Sudanese government unless it met six conditions.
“No peace process is going to take place unless the government meets our conditions,” Ahmed Tugod Lissan of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) told Reuters.
“If the government side does not accept our six conditions then there will be no political dialogue, either now or later.”
The fighting in Sudan’s western Darfur region has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Neither of Darfur’s two rebel groups has met government delegates for talks since the latest bid to restart a fragile peace process opened at the headquarters of the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa on Thursday.
The government, facing worldwide protests over Arab militia attacks on African civilians, has rejected the rebels’ six demands, which the rebels say must be met within one month.
The government says it is prepared to discuss the demands as part of peace talks but not as a pre-requisite for those talks.
The rebels launched a revolt in the remote west of the African oil producer, the continent’s largest country, last year after long conflict between African villagers and Arab nomads.
The rebels accuse the government of arming Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, to loot and burn African villages in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Khartoum denies the charge.
The 53-nation AU formally opened the talks on Thursday to try to stop the bloodshed.
The United Nations says the fighting has displaced more than one million people, and as many as 30,000 have been killed.
The JEM and SLA conditions are for Khartoum to disarm the militias, provide access for an inquiry into genocide charges, bring criminals who committed genocide or ethnic cleansing to justice, allow unimpeded humanitarian access, free prisoners of war and detainees and set a neutral venue for future talks.
The rebels say Addis Ababa is not a neutral venue because of the Ethiopian government’s friendship with Khartoum.
AU mediators met members of the government delegation on Friday, and JEM and fellow rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) were meeting AU officials on Saturday. But there was no immediate prospect of direct rebel-government talks, delegates said.
The AU-hosted talks are meant to cover the status of a truce, disarmament of combatants, the humanitarian situation and deployment of AU ceasefire monitors.