African Union, Sudanese officials hold talks on Darfur
KHARTOUM, Sudan, Feb 28, 2005 (AP) — The African Union said Monday that it and Sudanese officials have held talks here to pave the way for resumed efforts to end the two-year Darfur conflict.
Three days of talks between both sides ended in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, over the weekend dealing with “the present security situation on the ground,” according to a statement released by the African body.
The statement said Sudanese and African Union officials discussed preparatory issues for the next round of peace talks, which are also expected to involve Darfur rebel groups, in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.
No date was set for the talks, but previous rounds, including the last one in December, have failed to calm Darfur, where two shaky African Union-monitored cease-fire deals are in place.
The talks are aimed at ending a conflict that has claimed 70,000 lives since March — mostly from disease and hunger — while 2 million people have been displaced.
Fighting started in Darfur after rebels of ethnic African tribes took up arms, complaining of discrimination by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum. A pro-government Arab militia, known as the Janjaweed, launched a violent counterinsurgency.
The AU mediation team left Khartoum Sunday for Kenya and Eritrea to hold similar consultations with leaders of the main Darfur rebel groups — the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).
The United States has called on the Sudanese government to do more to end the Darfur conflict, which the United Nations says has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
A U.S. human rights group urged the U.N. Security Council to take urgent action in Darfur amid new eyewitness accounts from the volatile region of rapes, torture and mutilation by the Janjaweed.
Human Rights Watch has issued a statement saying eyewitnesses in South Darfur said Janjaweed militiamen attacked villages in the Labado area in December and January and raped young women and girls.
“Male relatives who protested were beaten, stripped naked, tied to trees and forced to watch the rape of the women and girls,” the statement said. “In some cases, the men were then branded with a hot knife as a mark of their humiliation.”
Meanwhile, the U.N. children’s fund representative to Sudan, Joanna Van Gerpen, said this country’s polio outbreak — with 132 cases being detected so far — spelled danger for the rest of the African continent.
Polio cases linked to Sudan have been detected this year in Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia.
“There is a high risk that Sudan could become a vector for the re-infection of the whole of Africa and a case in Ethiopia suggests this may already be happening,” van Gerpen said Monday during a visit to Wau, a major city in southern Sudan.
The U.N. official was taking part in a massive countrywide campaign aimed at vaccinating more than 6 million Sudanese children against polio. Sudan has the third highest rate of polio in the world after Nigeria and India.
“We want to make sure that every child is immunized,” she said. “We hope that in one or two years there will be no polio cases in this area.”
Polio was expected to have been cleared of polio by the end of 2005, but the disease re-emerged following the outbreak of the Darfur conflict and the population movement within and outside the Sudan.