African Union to relaunch peace talks for Sudan’s Darfur region

ABUJA, Oct 20 (AFP) — The African Union will invite Sudan’s government and rebels from the Darfur region back to the negotiating table on Thursday in a bid to show that the troubled continent is able to handle its own crises.

The AU peace initiative has won international support but non-African countries, led by the United States, have warned that the world cannot stand by indefinitely as casualties mount in the 20-month-old civil conflict in western Sudan.

Government and rebel representatives have therefore been called back to the Nigerian capital Abuja to relaunch an AU-sponsored peace conference which last month foundered amid rancour and disagreements over the scope of the talks.

If the talks remain deadlocked, the United Nations Security Council may wade in and revive a threat of sanctions against Khartoum, which stands accused of sending a brutal proxy militia to murder and harass people in Darfur who support the rebels.

Such an outcome would be a humiliation for regional leaders, who are determined to find an African solution to the crisis.

At a summit in Tripoli at the weekend, five African leaders, including AU chairman President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, stressed their “rejection of all foreign intervention in this purely African question”.

Nigeria and Rwanda are in the process of deploying troops to Sudan to form an AU peacekeeping force for Darfur, which Obasanjo wants to be 4,500-strong by the end of next month when three more countries sign up.

But without an agreement on humanitarian and security protocols at the Abuja talks, there may be little peace to keep.

The United Nations estimates that 70,000 people have been killed and 1.5 million driven from their homes since Darfur’s rebel groups launched an uprising, accusing Khartoum of leaving their region on the economic and political sidelines.

The rebel Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) want to discuss greater autonomy and a greater share of Sudan’s oil revenues for their arid, rural region.

Khartoum initially resisted, insisting that the rebels must be demobilised and disarmed before substantive political discussions could begin, but the government has since come under greater international pressure to change its tune.

The United States has described the attacks by Khartoum’s Arab militias on Darfur’s black African tribes as genocide, and both the United Nations and the Arab League have said they now expect progress at the AU talks.

For its part, the Sudanese government now insists it is ready for talks.

“We are determined and fully mandated to reach a negotiated settlement to the Darfur problem. We are going to negotiate with an open mind,” Sudan’s junior foreign minister Naguib al-Khair Abdel Wahab told AFP on Wednesday.

The first items on the agenda when the parties arrive back in Abuja will be draft humanitarian and security protocols, setting out an agreement by both sides to protect refugees, ensure aid deliveries and enforce a ceasefire.

The text was agreed at last month’s abortive talks, but never put into effect. AU mediators see the two protocols as the foundation stones for both the full deployment of their neutral force and future political negotiations.

Talks are expected to take place as before at the Abuja International Conference centre and an adjoining luxury hotel, but there was no immediate word on when the delegations would arrive.