Sudan asks UN to verify Darfur refugee returns
By Opheera McDoom
KHARTOUM, Sept 28 (Reuters) – Sudan has asked the United Nations to help verify reports that 190,000 refugees from the conflict-hit western Darfur region have voluntarily returned to their homes, the U.N. refugee agency chief said on Tuesday.
UNHCR head Ruud Lubbers also said a long-delayed peace agreement to end a separate civil war in Sudan’s south would not help the people of Darfur unless there was a simultaneous push for peace to end the 19-month-old rebellion in the remote west.
The U.N. estimates about 1.5 million people are displaced in Darfur, with 200,000 refugees encamped in Chad, creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Lubbers said government officials had told him that 190,000 of the displaced had returned voluntarily to their homes.
He told reporters in Khartoum that First Vice-President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha had complained that the international community did not believe government reports of returnees.
“So he invited UNHCR to be present to go together and verify the voluntariness of returns,” Lubbers said after a five-day visit to eastern Chad and Darfur.
After years of skirmishes between Arab nomadic tribes and mainly non-Arab farmers over scarce resources in arid Darfur, rebels launched a revolt accusing Khartoum of neglect and supporting Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, to loot and burn non-Arab villages.
The government admits arming some militias to fight the rebels, but denies any links to the Janjaweed.
A U.N. Security Council resolution threatens Sudan with possible sanctions if it fails to stop the violence in Darfur, which the United States says is genocide.
A U.S. State Department official in Khartoum told reporters all parties to the conflict needed to be disarmed, not only the Janjaweed. He said a reduction in violence in Darfur so far was not enough.
“We won’t be satisfied with the situation until there’s zero violence,” he said, adding there was a risk up to 100,000 more refugees could cross the border into Chad to escape violence, and he was concerned some refugees may never return to Sudan.
Lubbers said peace talks set to begin on Oct. 7 in the Kenya city of Naivasha to end more than two decades of civil war in Sudan’s south, should not reach a deal before making substantial progress in negotiations to end the separate Darfur conflict.
Darfur peace talks in the Nigerian capital Abuja collapsed earlier this month and are due to reconvene about Oct. 21.
In Oslo, a senior Sudanese government official said on Tuesday that Sudan urgently needed over $300 million in aid from international donors to deal with the humanitarian crisis, including rebuilding roads to let refugees return home.
“Now the region needs over $300 million,” Yahia Hussien Babiker Mohamed, head of the Khartoum government’s delegation to a preliminary international conference in Norway on aid for Sudan, told Reuters.
The state minister in President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s office said he was referring to the immediate needs, including rebuilding roads and restoring transport, health care and other basic services.
But Western officials said that holding a donors’ conference would depend on the conclusion of a comprehensive peace deal.
(Additional reporting by Amil Khan in Cairo and John Acher in Oslo)