Sudan government, rebels set agenda for Darfur peace talks

By Dave Clark

ABUJA, Aug 24 (AFP) — Sudanese government envoys and the leaders of two rebel groups from the war-torn Darfur region agreed Tuesday to an agenda for African Union-sponsored peace talks aimed at resolving the 18-month-old war in the far west of Sudan.

AU chairman President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and several senior African and UN officials welcomed the warring parties to the headquarters of the west African bloc ECOWAS for the second day of the talks.

At the end of the morning session, Obasanjo announced to journalists: “I think we have made some progress. We’ve made the first step in the right direction in these very important talks.”

The talks restarted later in the day with negotiations on the first item on the agenda: the provision of humanitarian aid to Darfur, where the UN reports that 1.2 million people have been displaced by fighting between rebels and the Sudanese army and an allied Arab militia.

AU leaders hope that if agreement on a political and security strategy can be reached it will reinforce efforts to enforce a ceasefire in the western Sudanese region, where more than 30,000 people have died in the past 18 months.

The rebel groups, however, insist that they want the African Union to pressure Khartoum into granting Darfur and other regions greater autonomy and a better share of the national income. They are also refusing to disarm.

“How can we disarm our people? Without a proper security arrangement, these forces are our guarantee,” declared Abdel-Wahid Mohamed Ahmed el-Nur, leader of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), as he arrived at the talks on Tuesday.

The SLM and their allies the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) are seeking amendments to the agenda to reinforce their demands for greater political and economic power for regions which they claim are marginalised by Khartoum.

“The regions should elect their own government and hold it to account. The regions should have their own constitutions,” JEM spokesman Ahmed Hussein Adam said. “We’re not seeking to separate from our country, we want to be equal.”

For their part, the Sudanese government accused the rebels of breaching a existing ceasefire agreement, including in attack at the weekend in which four Sudanese humanitarian workers and two journalists were allegedly kidnapped.

“Despite all that, we will continue to participate in these negotiations with the same spirit. Hopefully there will be an agreement between us and the rebel groups,” the government party’s spokesman Ibrahim Mohammed Ibrahim said.

There is no official date for the talks here to end — officials expect them to go on for several more days — but there is an implicit deadline in a looming United Nations security council ultimatum.

The UN has given Sudan until the end of the month to demonstrate that it is serious about restoring peace and security to Darfur, or face the prospect of sanctions. Meanwhile, international frustration is mounting.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw urged the Sudanese government Tuesday to “make a real effort” to ease the suffering caused by its bloody clampdown in Darfur, as he visited some of the million-plus people who have been displaced.

Straw said the authorities had made some advances in opening up the region to relief agencies and providing protection from the Arab militia — the notorious Janjaweed — which Khartoum has sponsored to crush the rebels.

But he said more needed to be done, and “that requires a real effort by the government of Sudan to provide for their safety and also to ensure that there is progress in the peace talks.”

The AU is pushing Khartoum to allow the deployment of a 2,000-strong peacekeeping force of Nigerian and Rwandan troops, to protect aid shipments and oversee the cantonment and eventual demobilisation of the rebels.

But, despite receiving guarantees that Khartoum would retain the lead role in ensuring security in Darfur, the Sudanese delegation has resisted this suggestion and has insisted that it is not yet on the agenda.

Obasanjo said that, at the outset: “It was the request of the Sudanese government that they will require the assistance of AU troops to help in garrisoning and disarming the ‘rebels’, as they call them.

“The JEM and the SLM call themselves ‘resistance fighters’. Whichever way you call them, they will have to be disarmed,” he added.