ABUJA, 12 September 2004 — The African Union special envoy tackling the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region has met with government officials and rebel leaders in a bid to break the deadlock in peace talks here, a rebel spokesman said yesterday. The three-week-old AU-brokered talks aimed at restoring peace in Darfur were suspended until tomorrow because of differences on the key issue of security and disarmament.
Abduljabbar Dofa, a spokesman for the Sudan Liberation Movement, told AFP that Nigerian-born AU special envoy Gen. Abdussalami Abubakar had been meeting with the two sides ahead of tomorrow’s plenary session. “The special envoy is intensifying efforts to get both the government side and the rebel movements to reach a compromise,” he said. “The envoy stressed the need for us to bring our views together so that we can make progress,” he added.
AU spokesman Assane Ba told AFP that although formal talks had been suspended, consultations would continue in the next three days. He said mediators were looking forward to an intervention by Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo as AU chairman and host to move the talks forward.
“We hope that the two sides will reach a compromise when they meet with President Obasanjo,” he said. Obasanjo had previously met the two parties at the start of the peace talks when they disagreed on humanitarian issue and the rebels staged a walkout. Up to 50,000 people have lost their lives and some 1.4 million displaced since February 2003 when two rebel groups — the SLM and Justice and Equality Movement — took up arms against the government in Khartoum.
Rebel fighters have raided villages in North Darfur, attacked police stations and looted property, the independent Al-Hayat daily reported yesterday. Some 30 rebels, carrying light arms and traveling in two vehicles, attacked five villages in the district of Um Kaddadah “in violation of the cease-fire agreement.”
The paper added that the rebels burned down two police stations in the area, ransacked a local water-pumping facility and Zakah (Islamic tax) offices and stole three private vehicles and communications equipment. It said the rebels also searched the houses of local officials before fleeing. The report did not say which of the two main rebel groups was allegedly responsible for the attacks.
Meanwhile, Sudanese security forces discovered an arms cache they say was hidden by a member of an Islamist opposition party for use in an attempt to sabotage the government, the interior ministry said yesterday. The arms, discovered in Al-Khilailah, north of Khartoum in a dawn raid on Friday, included 100 Kalashnikovs, 10 mortars, more than 100 shells and other weapons, said an interior ministry statement sent to Reuters.
Sudan’s semi-official press carried photos of the weapons. The security services said last week it had arrested 33 members of Hassan Turabi’s Popular Congress party for an attempted sabotage plot with help from Sudan’s eastern neighbor Eritrea.
He and his party are blamed for fanning the flames of a rebellion in the Darfur region. The United Nations estimates the fighting has caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises with more than one million displaced and 200,000 refugees encamped in neighboring Chad.
The United States said on Thursday the Darfur conflict amounted to genocide and blamed the government and Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, for the violence. The security services continued to arrest high-level PC party officials, family members said, with the chairman of the foreign relations office, Mohamed Al-Amin Khalifa, detained on Friday evening.
“The government says it wants to arrest all the members of the Popular Congress. They arrested my father yesterday,” said Hajjar Khalifa. She said he had been taken to Khobar prison in Khartoum.
