Sudan’s Darfur rebels split over secular state demands

By Silvia Aloisi

ABUJA, Oct 31 (Reuters) – Darfur’s main rebel group insisted on Sunday religion and state should be separated in Sudan, a demand rejected by Khartoum and which has divided the two rebel groups at peace talks in Nigeria.

Displaced Sudanese pray at the Abu Shouk refugee camp, in the outskirts of El-Fasher, Darfur.

The rebel movements negotiating with Sudan’s Islamist government to try to end the 20-month-old conflict in Darfur have been unable to come up with a common political framework, presenting separate documents to mediators instead.

The United Nations says 70,000 people have died of disease and malnutrition in Darfur since March. There are no reliable figures for those killed by the fighting, which Washington calls genocide and the U.N. says has displaced 1.6 million people.

Talks in Nigeria’s capital Abuja to end the fighting have stalled, mainly on security and disarmament issues, while parallel negotiations on Sudan’s future political system have also failed to make much progress.

The main rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), wants a clear separation between political and religious affairs in Sudan — a demand rejected by the government and unlikely to find support with the second, more Islamist-oriented, rebel group at the talks, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).

POLITICS AND RELIGION

“This is a very important issue for us. I am a Muslim, but religion in our country is being used to kill and marginalize people,” said SLA spokesman Mahgoub Hussain.

But JEM spokesman Ahmed Hussain said: “I think this is something we should leave for the people of Sudan to decide in wider consultations.

“We didn’t take up arms to fight for the separation of politics and religion. We took up arms to fight against marginalisation.”

Government negotiators said Sudan’s mainly Muslim north, including Darfur, should continue to be governed by the principles of Islamic law.

“Sharia is the law and should be the law. The concept of separation between state and religion does not exist in the Islamic world. It’s all politics, it’s all religion,” said Abdul Zuma, media adviser to the government delegation.

While the government has agreed in separate peace talks with mainly Christian and animist rebels in southern Sudan not to apply Sharia law there, Zuma said that deal did not include the western region of Darfur.

The SLA and the JEM took up arms in February last year, accusing Khartoum of neglecting Darfur and arming Arab militias to kill African villagers.

Most of Darfur’s ethnically Arab and African tribes are devout Muslims, but the non-Arabic speaking tribes see themselves as culturally distinct from the Arab tribes dominating politics in Khartoum.

The leadership of the two rebel groups have very different backgrounds. JEM’s leaders are widely believed to have retained prior links with Sudan’s opposition leader and Islamic ideologist Hassan al-Turabi, an advocate of Sharia law.