Sudan MPs urge UN to put pressure on Darfur rebels
By Opheera McDoom
KHARTOUM, Sept 21 (Reuters) – The United Nations should pressure rebels fighting the Sudanese government to rejoin peace talks on a conflict in Darfur rather than threaten Khartoum with sanctions, Sudanese parliamentarians said on Tuesday.
Members of Sudan’s national assembly said the international community was putting too much pressure on the government side and not enough on the rebels, an approach they said led to the collapse last week of peace talks between the two sides.
The talks were designed to end a 19-month conflict in Darfur, scene of what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, in which 50,000 people have been killed. The U.S. has described the violence as genocide.
“It is better for the international community to help to push both sides to sit down again for negotiations because if there is still war then it is difficult for them to sit down with each other,” said William Othwonh Awer, chairman of the federal relations committee.
The U.N. Security Council last week adopted a resolution that threatened Khartoum with sanctions, including on its budding petroleum industry, if the government does not stop violence in its remote west.
Helen Oller, a member of the parliament’s peace committee, said: “Because they (the rebels) know the Sudanese government is under pressure … they became a bit uncooperative to tackle the real … negotiations.”
“The rebels, if they are also put under pressure, will come to a logical discussion and logical agreement with the Sudanese government,” she said, adding the rebels were being encouraged by the support of major powers.
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Peace talks sponsored by the African Union in the Nigerian capital collapsed last week and the top U.N. envoy in Sudan said the rebels were the more difficult party.
Talks in July in Ethiopia failed after the rebels imposed preconditions, rejected by the government.
After years of low-level fighting between Arab nomads and African farming communities over scarce resources in arid Darfur, rebels took up arms accusing Khartoum of neglect and of arming marauding Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, to loot and burn African villages.
The government admits arming some militias to fight the rebels but denies any links to the Janjaweed, calling them outlaws.
Al-Sherif al-Muntaqi, a representative from North Kordofan state, said the problem was not a lack of development: “They (the rebels) want power,” he said.
The international community should give more aid to rebuild the region and make it safe for people to return to their homes, he said.
The U.N. estimates the fighting has displaced more than one million people with about 200,000 refugees in neighbouring Chad, triggering one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
(Khartoum newsroom, +249 912 167 378, editing by Matthew Bigg)