Sudan could see Somali-style anarchy: US envoy

By C. Bryson Hull

NAIROBI, Sept 24 (Reuters) – Sudan risks falling into Somalia-style anarchy if peace talks aimed at ending separate crises in Darfur and the south fail and embolden more factions to take up arms, the top U.S. envoy to Sudan said on Friday.

But Charles Snyder, the State Department’s senior representative on Sudan, said a collapse into the civil strife that has gripped Somalia since 1991 remained a worst-case scenario.

Sudan is under international pressure to solve not only the Darfur crisis, which has displaced 1.5 million people in the west, but a 20-year-old civil war in the south that has claimed more than two million lives.

Peace talks on the southern war are due to reopen in the Kenyan town of Naivasha on Oct. 7. Negotiations in Abuja, Nigeria, on Darfur are due to reconvene in October after collapsing this month with both sides far apart on key issues.

If the talks fail to achieve political solutions, it could encourage more Sudanese factions to take up arms to get their way, Snyder said.

“This is a formula that could lead us, in the worst case, to a Somalia-like situation,” he told reporters. “I don’t think that is a probability. I think if everything went wrong, it’s a possibility.”

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, told Reuters in Chad on Friday there was no sign of a political solution in the Abuja talks.

“It’s clear there has to be some partition of power in Darfur,” he said.

Asked whether that meant autonomy, he said: “Yes.”

Lubbers was in Chad’s capital N’djamena at the start of a five-day visit to Chad and Sudan.

STABILISE SITUATION

He said one of the aims of the trip, especially the Sudanese leg, was to try to stabilise the situation and ensure protection for people displaced in violence the United States has called genocide.

A revolt broke out in western Sudan in early 2003 among African-speaking villagers. Rebels, governments and rights groups say Arab militias, who have long competed with the settled population for land, went on a rampage, setting fire to villages, killing, raping and driving people off their land.

The United Nations estimates up to 50,000 people have died in conflict since the fighting began.

Last week, the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution calling for deployment of a large African Union force to monitor a shaky ceasefire agreed in April between rebels and the government. It also threatened possible sanctions against Khartoum if it did not rein in the so-called Janjaweed militias.

“If the political will of the Sudanese authorities doesn’t produce an end to the violence on the ground, we very much need the people of the African Union,” he said.

Nigerian President and AU chairman Olusegun Obasanjo told the United Nations in New York on Thursday that the 53-nation AU would decide by early October if it could mobilise troops, called for by a U.N. Security Council resolution last week.

He appealed for $200 million from wealthy nations to fund logistics.

The U.S. Senate on Thursday approved a bill providing $75 million, and Canada has offered the equivalent of $16 million.

Snyder said Washington would offer technical, material and financial support to AU peacekeepers in Darfur once the AU organised a projected force of between 3,000 and 5,000 troops.

“Until we get their plan, the question is somewhat hypothetical,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Bernhard Warner in London and Silvia Aloisi in N’djamena)