TRIPOLI, 27 July 2004 — Sudan has asked Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi to sponsor peace talks to bring an end to 18 months of bloodshed in its troubled Darfur region, the official Libyan news agency JANA reported yesterday. A Sudanese ministerial delegation on Sunday delivered a message from President Omar Bashir calling on Qaddafi to “sponsor peace negotiations on Darfur,” the news agency said.

Sudan’s Interior Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein and Agriculture Minister Majzub Khalifa Ahmed delivered the message during a visit to neighboring Libya on Sunday.

African Union-sponsored peace talks in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa broke down on July 18 without an agreement between the Khartoum government and the two ethnic minority rebel groups active in Darfur.

The United Nations has warned that conflict in Darfur has plunged the western Sudanese region into the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis. The UN says up to 50,000 people have died since a revolt against the government in Khartoum broke out among the indigenous minorities in February 2003.

More than a million people have been driven from their villages in the conflict pitting government forces and state-sponsored Arab militias against two rebel movements — the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Movement for Justice and Equality. Revising the previous estimated death toll of 30,000, UN spokesman Ben Parker said in Nairobi yesterday: “Up to 50,000 people might could have lost their lives as a result of the conflict.” Parker announced that an eight-strong team of UN human rights experts were due to travel to the crisis region shortly. It was the first time that the Sudanese government had officially agreed to such an on-going mission, he said.

While the members of the delegation had received their visa it was still unclear whether they needed extra permits to travel to Darfur as aid workers had recently been allowed to travel without it, he said. Journalists applying for access to the region are still being delayed by red tape.

Meanwhile, the Sudanese government reiterated yesterday that it was willing to cooperate with the international community to solve the conflict. “We want to cooperate with the African Union and the international community,” Bashir told the British Broadcasting Corporation yesterday.

He was speaking as European Union foreign ministers were preparing to meet in Brussels to repeat warnings that Khartoum may face sanctions if it does not disarm Janjawid militias accused of killing thousands of people and systematically raping women in Darfur.

However, Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail denied yesterday that the conflict was motivated by the ethnic differences between the Janjawid and the settled black Africans in the region. “The problem rather is one between tribes which conduct agriculture and the nomads,” he said.

Washington, the United Nations and the European Union have demanded that Khartoum immediately disarm the militias and make them respect a cease-fire signed April 8 after talks in the Chadian capital N’djamena.

The US Congress last week adopted a resolution describing the atrocities committed in Darfur as genocide and calling on the White House to lead international efforts to intervene. The EU warned at the weekend that Sudan would face international sanctions if there was not quick progress in ending the bloodshed.

The Arab Organization for Human Rights expressed concern yesterday over the humanitarian situation in the Darfur region, but insisted there was no need for foreign military intervention in the crisis. “The organization sees that (foreign military intervention) will not achieve any progress towards resolving the problem,” the group said, according to the state news agency MENA in Cairo.

It said it was worried about “the growing calls for military intervention” in Darfur and “attempts to add an ethnic-cleansing dimension to the incidents” including in a US Congress resolution.

However, the AOHR also called on the Sudanese government to shoulder its responsibilities in protecting the citizens of Darfur, stabilizing the security situation, ensure investigations into alleged crimes are transparent and to bring perpetrators to justice. It further urged “Arab governments to shoulder their responsibilities towards efforts to resolve the problem.”

Meanwhile, the second of the two big rebel groups in Darfur rejected new talks with the government until Khartoum carries out its commitments under a ceasefire agreement signed in April. “We are willing to meet anywhere ... but we are not willing to enter into political talks until what we agreed upon on April 8 is implemented,” said Adam Ali Shogar, a senior official of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM).

The other rebel group in the western region of Darfur, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), took a similar position toward political talks with the Khartoum government on Sunday.

Both groups left talks in Ethiopia this month when Khartoum turned down their preconditions for meeting which included the disarmament of Arab militias known as the Janjawid. Shogar, the SLM representative on a joint commission set up to monitor a cease-fire in Darfur, was speaking to Reuters from the Chadian capital N’Djamena, where the truce was agreed.

The April agreement included a cease-fire by both sides and a group of independent monitors to make sure it holds.