UNITED NATIONS, 5 November 2004 — Sudan’s blood-soaked Darfur region could be headed toward disaster, with warlords on the loose and the government no longer in full control of its troops, the UN’s top Sudan official warned yesterday.
Just two weeks before a UN Security Council trip to Africa intended to help ease the crisis, Jan Pronk outlined a grim picture for council members and said the situation may soon become unmanageable.
“Fighting is breaking out in more and more places, parties are provoking one another, militias are ganging up,” he said. “Darfur may easily enter a state of anarchy - a total collapse of law and order.”
A vast desert region in the west of Sudan, Darfur has been wracked by violence since a rebel uprising against the Arab-led government in Khartoum in February 2003. The government responded in part by using proxy Arab militias to put down the rebellion, and those militias went on to carry out a brutal, scorched-earth campaign that has led to an estimated 70,000 deaths.
“The conflict is changing in character. The government does not control its own forces fully. It co-opted paramilitary forces and now it cannot count on their obedience,” Pronk said.
“The spirit is out of the bottle.” He said a split had emerged in the rebel leadership and that some commanders were now “acting for their own private gain,” with Khartoum’s troops unable to ease the situation or sometimes making the situation worse. “We may soon find Darfur is ruled by warlords,” Pronk said.
Peace talks between the government and rebel leaders in Nigeria are making limited progress, while no final accord has been reached between Khartoum and the SPLA over a separate north-south conflict that began in 1983. Now the Sudan People’s Liberation Army is “seeking to claim a wider area of Darfur as being under their control and are strengthening their logistical and fighting capacity,” said Pronk.
Amid the violence, the United Nations has warned that Darfur is also the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today, with more than one million people who have been displaced, most living in squalid and dangerous camps.
