Sudan says to accept African forces, no peacekeepers

By Nima Elbagir

KHARTOUM, Aug 7 (Reuters) – Sudan will accept African troops to protect observers in its troubled western Darfur region, but underlined any peacekeeping role would be limited to Sudanese forces, Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said on Saturday.

Ismail also said he had signed a Sudanese-U.N. pact pledging safe areas for up to 1 million African villagers uprooted by fighting in remote Darfur, which U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan sent to Security Council members on Friday.

“We have to make a distinction between three categories. The presence of observers, the presence of protection forces for those observers and the presence of peacekeeping forces,” Ismail told reporters in Khartoum when asked whether Sudan would accept African peacekeepers.

“We don’t have a problem with either the first or the second categories. As far as the third category is concerned … this is the responsibility of the Sudanese forces.”

He added Darfur, which the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, was a regional problem and Sudan was discussing it with bodies such as the African Union and the Arab League, due to hold an emergency meeting on Sunday.

The AU is proposing sending up to 2,000 troops to protect its ceasefire monitors in Darfur and to serve as peacekeepers, but has yet to send an official request to Khartoum.

Sudan has about three weeks left to show the U.N. Security Council it is serious about disarming marauding Arab militias known as Janjaweed, or face possible sanctions.

The joint pact pledges to set up safe areas for those displaced, work to disarm marauding militia and stop actions by its own troops in civilian areas.

Ismail said the pact, due to be signed on Monday, had in fact already been signed. “It was signed in the early hours of Friday morning in my office.”

REBELS TROOPS SURRENDER

A statement from the governor of Northern Darfur state said 210 rebels had surrendered. Rebels rebuffed the claim.

“Armed insurgents from the Justice and Equality rebel Movement (JEM) in Darfur delivered themselves today with all of their equipment to the military command in Tina (Tine), on the Sudanese-Chad border,” the statement from governor Osman Kebir’s office said overnight.

“The governor reiterates that the door is open to the absorption of all of the returnees from the armed insurgents in the different paths of the civil and military service and help would be given to them in the resumption of their normal lives.”

JEM is one of two main rebel groups that took up arms in February last year, accusing the government of neglect and of arming Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, to loot and burn African villages in a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

The government denies the charge and says the Janjaweed are outlaws.

JEM Secretary-General Bahar Idriss Abu Garda said the governor’s statement was “totally wrong”.

“What happened actually is the government rented six cars from the civilians inside Chad and they brought some people from inside Chad and they gave them arms contending they were from JEM,” he told Reuters from Darfur.

Abu Garda also accused the government of joint attacks with Janjaweed on civilians and rebel troops in violation of a ceasefire signed by both parties in early April.

“They killed 30 people, they burned eight villages and they attacked our troops (four days ago).” He added the fighting was in an area near Nyala, the capital of Southern Darfur state.

Both rebels and the government have accused each other of violating the April ceasefire.

Ben Parker, spokesman for the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, said the conflict had probably claimed about 50,000 victims, although it was difficult to obtain exact numbers in Darfur, which is the size of France.

A U.N. investigator said on Friday the Sudanese government was largely to blame for the Darfur humanitarian crisis and Khartoum’s responsibility for large numbers of killings in the region was beyond doubt.

Ismail said the Sudanese advisory council for human rights would reply to the investigator’s report in due course.

(Additional reporting by Opheera McDoom in Cairo)