CAIRO, 24 July 2004 — Rebels in western Sudan said yesterday that Arab militias had attacked twice in Darfur this week, despite the government’s insistence that it is cracking down on them. The rebel Justice and Equality Movement said the government had integrated more than 6,000 of the militiamen into the regular police, giving them uniforms and new weapons.
JEM general coordinator Abu Bakr Hamid Al-Nur said by telephone that police including some of the militiamen, known as Janjawid, had attacked a rebel camp on Wednesday in the Orshi area north of Al-Fashir, capital of North Darfur state.
He said that two days earlier, Janjawid had killed more than 30 people and kidnapped many women and children at Kfour, between Al-Fashir and Kutum, about 120 km to the northwest. The Janjawid are at the center of a conflict that has displaced more than a million people in remote Darfur and created what the United Nations says is one of the world’s most serious humanitarian crises.
The rebels and human rights groups say the government has armed and supported the Janjawid. The government says they are outlaws and it has started a campaign to disarm them. Nur, who said he was speaking from central Darfur, said: “The government is trying to go behind the bushes to commit their crimes.
The JEM and another rebel group in Darfur, the Sudan Liberation Movement, pulled out of political talks with the government last Saturday because Khartoum rejected their preconditions, including disarmament of the Janjawid. The rebel groups took up arms in early 2003 to protect the settled non-Arab people of Darfur from attacks by Arab nomads who have traditionally competed with them for land and grazing.
On Thursday the US Congress passed a resolution saying that genocide was under way in Darfur — a description many international observers on the ground say is an exaggeration. The African Union has plans to send a peace force to Darfur to protect monitors and humanitarian workers. Nur said an existing African Union presence was not sufficient.
The Bush administration has drafted a UN resolution threatening sanctions if the Sudanese government does not disarm the Janjawid and remove all restrictions on access to Darfur.
The Sudanese government says it is trying to comply but it will take time to implement its plans. “We don’t pretend that the situation has come back to normal,” Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail told the French daily Le Monde in an interview published yesterday. “There exists a real problem which has to be resolved on a humanitarian, political and security level and we intend to do that... But one has to understand that we are applying a plan that is working in stages,” Ismail added.
