Leaders must repair Darfur peace bid – diplomats
By William Maclean
NAIROBI, July 18 (Reuters) – Efforts to end Sudan’s Darfur crisis are in ruins after rebels stormed out of low-level peace talks, and only leaders of the warring parties can put the process back on track, diplomats said on Sunday.
Some said prospects were dim of such a meeting soon because the rebels were in no mood to compromise, believing they had the Sudan government on the defensive thanks to worldwide protests against Khartoum over the bloodshed.
“Without the leaders from both sides we will not successfully start the peace talks. But this has to be prepared. This needs some time,” the African Union’s (AU) Darfur envoy Hamid Algabid told Reuters by telephone from Addis Ababa.
Algabid steered last week’s failed effort to end an 18-month-old conflict in the west of Africa’s biggest country that has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. He said no date was set for a resumption of peace efforts.
Neither the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) nor the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebel groups would meet Sudan government delegates face-to-face last week at talks mediated by the AU at its headquarters in the Ethiopian capital.
Claiming the moral high ground in the conflict, they said they would do so only when Khartoum had fulfilled six conditions including disarming Janjaweed Arab militias and prosecuting people suspected of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The government team, led by Minister of State for Foreign Relations Najeeb al-Kheir Abdul Wahab, said it would talk about the demands but rejected them as preconditions for those talks.
The rebels accuse the government of arming the Janjaweed to loot and burn African villages in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Khartoum denies the charge.
The government is facing increasing international pressure over the bloodshed, which the United Nations says has displaced more than one million people and killed as many as 30,000.
The JEM and SLA launched a revolt in February 2003 in the west of the oil-producing country after long conflict between African villagers and Arab nomads.
Diplomats who struggled for three days to convene a rebel-government meeting said their task had never looked very promising because Darfur’s top rebel leaders had chosen instead to attend a Sudanese opposition conference held in Eritrea.
COMPROMISES
In contrast to the government team, the rebels sent only low-levels officials to Addis.
Diplomats in the region said the rebels had apparently failed to learn any lessons from a decade of efforts to end a separate conflict in Sudan’s south. Those talks made solid progress only recently, after leaders with the confidence to make compromises became personally involved last year.
“I think the rebels miscalculated. I think they are frittering away their goodwill,” an African diplomat said of the Darfur process. “The people they sent didn’t want to discuss anything beyond the venue.”
A Western diplomat said the Darfur rebels, with no real negotiating experience, had blundered by being too rigid.
“There’s a tendency to think that they are the victims and therefore the other side should simply agree to their maximum demands,” the Western diplomat said. The result was that the rebels had succeeded in making the government look reasonable.
Another sign of the rebels’ self-assurance emerged late on Saturday when the JEM issued a statement saying it and a group from the east of Sudan called the Sudanese Free Lions Association had pledged to join forces against Khartoum.
The pact – an apparent breach of a Darfur truce accord signed in April – was reached at the meeting of Sudanese opposition leaders in Asmara, which was also attended by John Garang of the southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
But the Darfur rebels’ confidence might be misplaced.
The SPLA sympathises with the Darfur rebels and offers them rhetorical support, but diplomats in the region said that with Garang set to become Sudan’s First Vice President under the separate southern peace process, he will not do more than that.