Late arrival of rebel commanders clears way for Sudanese peace talks

ABUJA, Oct 23 (AFP) — A final group of rebel field commanders arrived here on Saturday from the wartorn western Sudanese province of Darfur, clearing the way for the start of formal peace negotiations with the Khartoum government.

Darfur’s rebel political leaders have been in informal discussions with the government since Friday, but the commander of the AU monitoring force in the region said that group’s military leaders had been delayed in Chad.

Delegates are due to launch a full peace conference, designed to bring an end to a 20-month-old civil war which has left 70,000 dead and driven a million and a half people from their homes, on Monday.

“These are delegates whose presence is crucial to the peace talks because they are from the field in Darfur. I don’t see any meaningful progress in the talks without their presence,” Major General Festus Okonkwo explained.

“The rebels were suspicious of their safety and security, that is why they insisted on being brought here by the AU,” he explained, adding that an AU delegation had been sent to the Chadian capital Ndjamena to pick them up.

Later, Mohammed Tugod, leader of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), and AU special envoy Hamid Algabid said that the party had arrived in Abuja and that formal talks would go ahead on Monday as planned.

Tugod said that, aside from the Ndjamena party, three more rebel military chiefs were stuck in the Chadian border town of Abeche but that they had decided to abandon the journey and allow talks to start without them.

Darfur has been wracked with conflict since February last year when the JEM and the allied Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) rebelled against the alleged marginalisation of the region’s black African tribes by Khartoum’s Arab regime.

The government responded by unleashing an Arab proxy militia, the Janjaweed.

More than 70,000 people — the vast majority of them civilians — have been killed in the fighting and more than 1.5 million people driven from their homes and into squalid and dangerous refugee camps, according to UN estimates.

A ceasefire is theoretically in place while the African Union attempts to broker a political solution, but aid agencies say that bandit attacks continue, hampering efforts to bring in large-scale food deliveries.

Okonkwo’s AU force ought to be able to help monitor the ceasefire, but so far only Nigeria and Rwanda have formally committed troops and it may not reach its planned strength of 3,250 for two or more months, officials warn.

“We don’t know when the troops will start arriving in Darfur since the approval was only given about three days ago. Some countries have yet to get the request to contribute troops,” Okonkwo said.

Meanwhile in Abuja, mediators hope to quickly extract from the warring parties agreements to respect two protocols — one on humanitarian issues, the other on security — in order to stabilise the situation while talks continue.

Sudan’s deputy foreign minister Naguib al-Khair Abdel Wahab told AFP that his government would sign the protocol whether or not the rebels follow suit, and that the government would impose it unilaterally if necessary.

On Saturday, rebel and government delegates met with an AU official who was to present observations on the Naivasha peace process between the Sudanese government and an earlier rebellion in the south of the country.

Some mediators hope that the Naivasha Accords could serve as a blueprint for bringing an end to Darfur’s 20-month-old civil war.

On Sunday the parties are due to hear a presentation on the humanitarian crisis from the United Nations special representative in Sudan, Jan Pronk.

If real progress is not made under AU auspices then the international community may feel compelled to act.

The United Nations Security Council has already threatened to impose economic sanctions if Khartoum fails to rein in its gunmen, while the United States has accused the government of committing genocide.

International pressure on Sudan continued to mount on Saturday with European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana due to become the latest high-profile official to visit Khartoum to press for a peaceful end to the conflict.