Sudan says will try to meet U.N. demands on Darfur
By Nima Elbagir
KHARTOUM, July 31 (Reuters) – Sudan will try to comply with a U.N. resolution threatening sanctions if it does not disarm marauding militia in Darfur, a Sudanese envoy said Saturday, backing down from an initial rejection of the vote.
France said its soldiers based in Chad would help to bring aid and security to refugees flooding across the border from the western region blighted by months of fighting.
The U.N. Security Council adopted a U.S.-drafted resolution Friday which threatened to clamp sanctions on Sudan in 30 days if it failed to stop attacks by Janjaweed militia and bring them to justice.
“Sudan is not happy with the (U.N.) Security Council resolution, but we will comply with it to the best of our ability,” Osman Al Said, Sudan’s ambassador to the African Union, told a news conference in Ethiopia.
“Because should we fail to do so, we know our enemies would not hesitate to take other measures against our country.”
Sudan had at first rejected the resolution as “misguided,” prompting Secretary of State Colin Powell to urge Khartoum to meet U.N. demands and ease the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Darfuris uprooted by war.
“I hope the Sudanese government will use the time provided in the resolution to do everything it can to bring the Janjaweed under control,” he told reporters on a visit to Kuwait.
After a long conflict between Arab nomads and non-Arab farmers, rebels in Darfur launched a revolt in February 2003.
Arab Janjaweed militias, which Washington says are backed by Sudanese government forces, went on the rampage, driving more than a million people into squalid camps in Darfur and Chad.
FRENCH TROOPS TO HELP AID EFFORT
President Jacques Chirac said French troops in Chad would help in the delivery of humanitarian supplies and 200 soldiers would be deployed near the Sudanese border to secure the area.
France would make aircraft available in its former colony Chad to assist in the aid operation, Chirac’s office said.
Sudan’s foreign minister said one of two main Darfur rebel groups had spread fighting to the east of Africa’s largest country after joining forces with an eastern rebel group.
The Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), one of two main rebel groups fighting Khartoum in Darfur, made an alliance with an eastern rebel group at a conference in Eritrea two weeks ago.
“We have intelligence reports that they (JEM and the eastern group) have already started these (military) activities with the help of the Eritrean government,” said Mustafa Osman Ismail.
There was no independent verification of fighting in the east or immediate comment from rebels, the Sudanese Free Lions Association, who share many of the same grievances of western rebels, accusing Khartoum of neglecting the impoverished area.
The United Nations estimates the Darfur conflict has killed at least 30,000 people in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The African Union (AU) has 96 military observers monitoring an April cease-fire between the Sudanese government and rebel groups. It also plans to send 270 troops, mainly from Nigeria, South Africa and Rwanda.
“I hope the African Union will move forward aggressively as they have said they would in order to help these people and help to restore a sense of security,” Powell said.
EU TEAM
In an statement welcoming the U.N. resolution, the European Union said it would dispatch a team of civilian and military experts to the region this week to make an urgent assessment of how to support the AU mission.
Friday’s 13-0 Security Council vote, with abstentions from China and Pakistan, came after the United States deleted the provocative word “sanctions” from the resolution.
It was substituted with a reference to a provision in the U.N. charter that describes various forms of sanctions. Sudan’s AU envoy Al Said said Washington did not have the interests of people of Darfur at heart.
“Sudan completely rejects the motive of the U.S. government in sponsoring the resolution because it has nothing to do with the welfare of the people of Darfur or of Africa,” he said.
(Additional reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa, Arshad Mohammed in Kuwait, Kerstin Gehmlich in Paris, Amil Khan in Cairo)