Sudan signs landmark Darfur deals with rebels
By Dino Mahtani
ABUJA, Nov 9 (Reuters) – Sudan bowed to international pressure on Tuesday for a ban on military flights over the Darfur region, where 1.5 million have been forced from their homes, and signed two landmark peace deals with rebels.
After two weeks of talks in the Nigerian capital, the government dropped its opposition to the no-fly zone and signed agreements with rebels covering security and access for aid to Darfur, scene of what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
“We still have a long way to go, but the step we have taken this afternoon is a very important step in the right direction,” said Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo after a signing ceremony.
The government climb-down comes 10 days before a United Nations Security Council meeting at which Sudan could have seen sanctions imposed on its oil industry because of the lack of progress in the talks and a deteriorating security situation on the ground in Darfur.
The security protocol, which imposes a ban on “hostile military flights” over the desert region the size of France, also envisages the government disarming loyalist militia known as the Janjaweed who are accused of a campaign of rape and killing.
It also instructs both sides to reveal the location of their forces to ceasefire monitors.
The humanitarian protocol says aid workers should be given free access to refugees in precarious, makeshift camps where disease and malnutrition have killed at least 70,000 people since March.
The agreements were hailed as a breakthrough by African Union mediators at the two-week-old talks, but analysts doubted whether they would be implemented.
“When it is put under pressure, the Sudanese government says it will concede, but whether this translates to action is another question and I think that is unlikely,” said Tom Cargill, Africa programme coordinator of the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London.
Obasanjo echoed these doubts, saying: “These documents won’t be worth the paper they are written on if they are not scrupulously implemented on the ground.”
ARAB MILITIA
The African Union is deploying 3,000 troops and civilian police to monitor a shaky ceasefire, and the United Nations has floated the idea of a much larger force with a more powerful peacekeeping role.
An AU mediator said the no-fly zone would at least be something that the AU monitors could start to enforce. “They have people at the airport and their numbers may rise,” he added.
The Abuja talks are due to resume on Tuesday night to address a common declaration of political principles, Obasanjo said.
The Sudanese government has agreed to disarm the Janjaweed before, and it questioned the definition of the term at the Abuja talks.
The horse-riding Arab militia is blamed by many black Africans for an orchestrated campaign of rape, burning and looting of their mud-hut villages.
The rebels say the government backs the Janjaweed, but Khartoum calls them outlaws.
Large scale fighting erupted in early 2003 when two African rebel groups staged an uprising, accusing Khartoum of neglect.
The conflict followed years of low intensity fighting between Arab nomads and mainly African farmers over scarce resources in the vast desert region.