KHARTOUM, 4 October 2004 — Ethnic minority rebels in Darfur have rejected an attempt by the Sudanese government to divide them ahead of a new round of peace talks in Nigeria later this month, a daily reported yesterday.

The Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) said it would not take part in the talks in Abuja on Oct. 21 unless fellow rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) were also allowed to take part.

Khartoum “has no right to name which of the opposition movements can take part in the talks but can name its own delegation,” SLM spokesman Mahjoub Hussein told the Akhbar Al-Youm daily from his base in London.

The Sudanese government has accused the JEM of complicity in an alleged coup attempt in Khartoum last month by the Popular Congress party of jailed Islamist opposition leader Hassan Al-Turabi and rejected it as a negotiating partner.

But the rebels, along with nearly all the other myriad armed groups opposed to the military-backed regime in Khartoum, charge that the alleged coup bid never took place and was a mere government ploy to divert attention from its mounting diplomatic woes.

The SLM spokesman expressed concern that Khartoum was set to retain its hard-line point man on Darfur — Agriculture Minister Majzoub Al-Khalifa Ahmed — for the next round of negotiations for an end to the 20-month conflict in the vast western region. The current team “lacked the political vision needed for the negotiations,” Hussein said.

The agriculture minister has been outspoken in rejecting mounting international pressure for a genuinely federal system to address the grievances of Sudan’s non-Arab minorities in the north as well as the south.

On Thursday he was quoted as saying that Khartoum “does not speak at the moment about autonomy to any region in the north,” backtracking on pledges by other ministers that self-rule for Darfur was on the table.

A government official meanwhile accused the SLM as well as the JEM of “conspiring” with the Popular Congress and charged that representatives of both factions had abused their positions on an African Union cease-fire observer mission to further their uprising.