KHARTOUM, 21 August 2004 — Sudan has pledged an open mind going into peace talks with rebels from the war-ravaged western Darfur region and is apparently seeking to use accords it signed with southern fighters as a model to settle the conflict. The stakes are high for both the rebels, who say they are seeking a better economic and political deal for Darfur, and Khartoum, which has come under huge international pressure to halt atrocities against the people of the impoverished region.
The immediate future of more than a million people forced from their homes by the conflict and now scattered across the region or living in camps across the border in Chad where disease and hunger are spreading also hangs in the balance. “Our concern is to find a quick peaceful solution to all the unresolved questions,” a government official told AFP ahead of the talks slated to open under the aegis of the African Union (AU) in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Monday.
The official, who asked not to be named, said the government was going into the talks, called by Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, the current AU chairman and which mark a last chance for African diplomacy before the United Nations intervenes, with an “open spirit.”
Some 30,000 Sudanese, victims of fresh attacks by Arab militia inside Darfur, have threatened to cross into Chad, already stretched with 200,000 refugees from the conflict, the United Nations said yesterday. Sudanese authorities are conducting propaganda campaigns on the radio and through village chiefs to prevent Darfuris from leaving their homeland, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said.
Jean-Marie Fakhouri, head of UNHCR operations for Sudan, this week met 30,000 Sudanese at Masteri, south of El Geneina in Western Darfur state, who reported recent rapes, killings and attacks by militiamen, spokesman Ron Redmond told a briefing in Geneva. The refugees demanded UN peacekeepers or other credible measures to make them feel secure in Sudan.
