Rebels attack Darfur oil, Libyans mediate in Abuja

By Opheera McDoom

KHARTOUM, Dec 20 (Reuters) – Rebels have attacked a South Darfur oil pumping station, the police chief said on Monday, and an African Union official said shots fired at an AU helicopter had hurt efforts to monitor military activity in the region.

Rebels from the Sudan Liberation Movement patrol on the way to their base in Gellab, Darfur.. (AFP).

The buildup of the AU force monitoring Sudanese government forces and rebel groups in the arid western region of Darfur continued with the dispatch by Gambia of 196 soldiers to add to the 800 AU troops already in place.

In the Nigerian capital Abuja, Libyan peace brokers met rebel and Sudanese government delegates to try to persuade them to stop fighting in Darfur and resume negotiations.

The Darfur rebellion began last year, when rebels accused Khartoum of neglecting the arid western region where tribal tensions have long simmered over scarce resources. The fighting has displaced 1.6 million people and killed tens of thousands.

Rebel negotiators in Abuja said they doubted whether the Libyans would be able to revive the talks, previously mediated by the 53-member African Union.

“We met the Libyan team today and we made our demands known to them. They said they will talk to the Sudan government and get back to us,” Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) official Mansour Arbab told Reuters.

The SLM and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) quit the Abuja talks soon after they resumed eight days ago, saying government forces must return to positions they held before the Ndjamena agreement in April for negotiations to restart.

“Right now we are not optimistic that the Sudan government will listen to the Libyans because they have defied everybody before, including the AU,” JEM spokesman Ahmed Adam said.

“The talks have deadlocked because we are not moving anywhere. The only option left is for the AU to take the matter to the U.N. Security Council because it seems that is the only body that can handle the situation now,” Adam told Reuters.

AU spokesman Assane Ba said the pan-African body would give Libya more time to persuade the feuding parties to resume negotiations and was not yet planning to report the Darfur situation to the U.N. Security Council.

The Sudanese government said on Sunday it would immediately cease all hostilities in the area of Labado, 65 kilometres (40 miles) east of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state.

But an AU official said a helicopter on its way to the area came under fire and had to turn back. “The helicopter is OK. There are no injuries and gunshot holes were seen on the body of the helicopter,” the official, who declined to be named, told Reuters.

AU officials said the attack was evidence that a ceasefire between the government and rebels in the Labado area was not holding, though it was not clear who fired at the helicopter.

They said the attack would make it harder for the AU to tell whether there was fighting in the area. “When there is some incident like this we have to stop and take a break to assess the situation …” the official said.

Also in South Darfur state, rebels attacked an oil pumping station at the weekend, killing 15 people, the state’s police chief Abdeen al-Tahir told Reuters.

“They killed 15 people — two workers, three civilians and 10 from the army,” he said. “This was the rebels who came in five vehicles on Saturday afternoon,” he added.

An oil ministry official in Khartoum said the operations of the Sharif field, pumping about 3,000 barrels a day (bpd), had not been affected by the attack.

Sudan produces around 320,000 barrels a day of crude oil and hopes to raise that to more than half a million barrels by next year.

The AU is gradually increasing the size of its multinational monitoring force in Darfur to more than 3,000. The latest additions were 196 Gambian troops who left Banjul on Monday.

(Additional reporting by Tume Ahemba in Abuja)