AU special envoy moves to break deadlock in Sudan’s Darfur talks

ABUJA, Sept 11 (AFP) — The African Union special envoy tackling the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region has met with government officials and rebel leaders in a bid to break the deadlock in peace talks here, a rebel spokesman said Saturday.

The three-week-old AU-brokered talks aimed at restoring peace in Darfur were suspended until Tuesday because of differences on the key issue of security and disarmament.

Abduljabbar Dofa, a spokesman for the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), told AFP that Nigerian-born AU special envoy General Abdusalame Abubakar had been meeting with the two sides ahead of Tuesday’s plenary session.

“The special envoy is intensifying efforts to get both the government side and the rebel movements to reach a compromise,” he said.

“The envoy stressed the need for us to bring our views together so that we can make progress,” he added.

AU spokesman Assane Ba told AFP that although formal talks had been suspended, consultations would continue in the next three days.

He said mediators were looking forward to an intervention by Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo as AU chairman and host to move the talks forward.

“We hope that the two sides will reach a compromise when they meet with President Obasanjo,” he said.

Obasanjo had previously met the two parties at the start of the peace talks when they disagreed on humanitarian issue and the rebels staged a walkout.

Up to 50,000 people have lost their lives and some 1.4 million displaced since February 2003 when two rebel groups — the SLM and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) — took up arms against the government in Khartoum.

The war began as an uprising by the black African rebel groups to protest at the alleged political and economic marginalisation of their region.

Khartoum’s response was to unleash a proxy Arab militia, the Janjaweed, on the region, arming them, backing them and giving them a free rein to crush the rebellion.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Thursday told a Senate hearing that evidence compiled by the United States concluded that genocide had been committed in Darfur and the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed militia bore responsibility.

The Sudanese government has rejected the US charge, while the rebels welcomed it, saying they had been vindicated.

“We have stated and restated since January that there is a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide taking place in Darfur,” JEM chief negotiator Mohammed Ahmed Tugod told AFP.