UN to send 7,000 peacekeepers, move offices to South Sudan

By MOMAHED OSMAN, Associated Press Writer

KHARTOUM, Sudan, Nov 22, 2004 (AP) — The United Nations said Monday it plans to deploy 7,000 peacekeeping troops to civil war-ravaged southern Sudan to maintain a peace deal reached recently and moves its offices to there from their current base in neighboring Kenya.

UN SC chairman John Danforth (c) signs a declaration flanked by Govt of Sudan representative Yaya Hussein Babikar (l) and SPLM Nhial Deng Nhial (r) during a special session of the Security Council focused on Sudan in Nairobi, Friday Nov 19, 2004.(AFP).

But violence continued in Sudan’s troubled western Darfur region with government forces and rebels clashing in two towns in apparent breach of an African Union-brokered cease-fire deal signed in Nigeria on Nov. 9.

Darfur’s ceaseless violence, marked by attacks on some of the more than 100 camps housing 1.6 million people displaced by the conflict, underscores the difficulties faced by the international community to restore calm in Africa’s largest country.

The United Nations hoped the accord reached in Kenya to end the 21-year southern civil war could help quell the Darfur conflict, which began in February 2003.

Radhia Achouri, spokeswoman for the U.N. mission in Sudan, said the world body is planning troop deployments and establishing U.N. agencies in southern Sudan to help shore up the peace agreement, which is expected to be sealed by the end of the year.

“A tentative figure of 7,000 troops is being considered to be deployed in the southern Sudan when the peace agreement has been finalized,” Achouri told The Associated Press.

Achouri said Jan Pronk, the U.N.’s top envoy to Sudan, announced that all United Nations organizations working to end the civil war will be moved to southern Sudan, possibly to the city of Rumbek, from their current base in Nairobi, Kenya, within six months.

Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail welcomed the U.N. moves but said his government has not yet received any official requests from the world body.

On arrival in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, from Kenya on Sunday, Pronk told reporters that the U.N. peacekeeping forces would be deployed within 30 days of the accord’s signing.

“There is no way for skepticism now,” Pronk said. “Of course a lot has to be done and I have decided now to speed up the redeployment of the United Nations structure here in the Sudan (from Kenya) so that we can have also a structure in the south of Sudan.”

Humanitarian relief efforts in Darfur have, however, been disrupted by the latest outbreak of fighting in Tawilla, a town in North Darfur state, and inside the Kalma displaced people’s camp, near the South Darfur capital of Nyala.

U.N. spokesman George Somerwill said Tawilla’s fighting began Sunday and continued Monday, preventing aid from reaching some 40,000 African villagers displaced by the fighting.

The rebel Sudan Liberation Army had taken control of parts of Tawilla, 67 kilometers (42 miles) west of the North Darfur capital of Al-Fasher, before pulling out of the town Monday, Somerwill told the AP.

“All humanitarian activities have been suspended because of the high level of insecurity,” Somerwill said.

Tawilla is a strategic location from where government supplies for forces based in western Sudan, near the Chad border, and areas in Darfur’s northwest pass through.

Mohamed Mansour, an SLA official in Eritrea, said Sudanese forces, backed by the Janjaweed Arab militia, had launched the attack near Tawilla on Sunday, killing 16 civilians. The claim could not be immediately verified.

Somerwill said SLA forces attacked Kalma early Monday and killed “a number of policemen,” before Sudanese forces took back control of the South Darfur camp and reopened it to humanitarian activities.

Darfur’s conflict started when two non-Arab African rebel groups took up arms to fight for more power and resources. The Sudanese government responded by backing the Janjaweed, which are now accused of targeting civilians in a campaign of murder, rape and arson. International agencies estimate that since March, disease, malnutrition and clashes among the displaced have killed more than 70,000 people.