Darfur rebels reject Khartoum bid to split them ahead of talks
KHARTOUM, Oct 3 (AFP) — Ethnic minority rebels in Darfur have rejected an attempt by the Sudanese government to divide them ahead of a new round of peace talks in Nigeria later this month, a Khartoum daily reported Sunday.
The Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) said it would not take part in the talks in Abuja on October 21 unless fellow rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) were also allowed to take part.
Khartoum “has no right to name which of the opposition movements can take part in the talks but can name its own delegation,” SLM spokesman Mahjoub Hussein told the Akhbar Al-Youm newspaper from his base in London.
The Sudanese government has accused the JEM of complicity in an alleged coup attempt in Khartoum last month by the Popular Congress party of jailed Islamist opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi and rejected it as a negotiating partner.
But the rebels, along with nearly all the other myriad armed groups opposed to the military-backed regime in Khartoum, charge that the alleged coup bid never took place and was a mere ploy by the government to divert attention from its mounting diplomatic woes.
The SLM spokesman expressed concern that Khartoum was set to retain its hardline pointman on Darfur — Agriculture Minister Majzoub al-Khalifa Ahmed — for the next round of negotiations for an end to the 20-month conflict in the vast western region.
The current team “lacked the political vision needed for the negotiations,” Hussein said.
The agriculture minister has been outspoken in rejecting mounting international pressure for a genuinely federal system to address the grievances of Sudan’s non-Arab minorities in the north as well as the south.
On Thursday he was quoted as saying that Khartoum “does not speak at the moment about autonomy to any region in the north,” sharply backtracking on pledges by other government ministers that self-rule for Darfur’s indigenous minorities was on the table.
As many as 50,000 people have died and 1.4 million fled their homes since Khartoum launched its bloody clampdown on the rebels and minority civilians suspected of supporting them, according to UN figures.
Despite two UN Security Council resolutions and an agreement with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Khartoum has yet to meet demands to stem what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis.