Agencies

KHARTOUM, 1 October 2005 — The African Union appealed for restraint yesterday after deadly attacks by Arab militias in Darfur and neighboring Chad threatened to wreck months of political, security and humanitarian efforts. “We are issuing an urgent appeal to all parties involved to halt all hostilities,” AU spokesman in Khartoum Nureddin Mezni told AFP.

He confirmed there had been a deadly attack by marauding horse- and camel-riding Arab gunmen in northwest Darfur against Aro Sharow camp for displaced Darfurians but could not confirm the UN’s death toll of 29. “Such acts have serious humanitarian repercussions since these people are already living a tragedy,” Mezni said, adding that an investigation into the incident was under way.

Mezni also said that such incidents were a blow to ongoing negotiations between Darfur rebel groups and the Sudanese government to end the 30-month-old civil conflict. The Darfur war has pitted ethnic minority black Darfurians against government troops and their proxies — sometimes described as Janjaweed — since February 2003, killing up to 300,000 people and displacing more than two million.

The conflict spilled over into neighboring Chad this week, when 75 people, including 55 herdsmen, were killed in the village of Madayoun near the border with Sudan. Chadian President Idriss Deby — himself a Zaghawa, one of the main tribes in Darfur — charged the attack had been carried out by Janjaweed.

The word Janjaweed is an Arab acronym which roughly means “men who ride horses and carry G-3 guns,” in reference to a German-made automatic rifle. They have been accused of carrying out massacres and rapes against local tribes.

Meanwhile, a senior Foreign Ministry official said yesterday Sudan will change its delegation to the Darfur peace talks to include former southern rebels who joined its coalition government earlier this month. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement joined the ruling National Congress party to form a new government following a January peace deal that ended more than two decades of civil war in the south.

But the deal did not cover a separate conflict in the Darfur region. A sixth round of peace talks is under way in the Nigerian capital Abuja to end that 2-1/2 year old rebellion, in which tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than 2 million forced from their homes. “They are going to participate,” Mutrif Siddiq, a senior Foreign Ministry official told Reuters.