ZAM ZAM, Sudan, 25 July 2006 — Almost three months after a partial peace deal was signed, the hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians in Darfur remain unwilling to go home until the Sudanese government’s Janjaweed proxy militia has been disarmed. A committee of elders representing the 43,000 people crammed into Zam Zam camp in North Darfur state heads to a routine meeting with an official from the African Union Mission in Sudan.
“We will stay in Zam Zam until security is restored, and to achieve that the Janjaweed need to be disarmed,” says one of them, Sheikh Ali Mohammed Fadul. Sheikh Hassan, the most senior of the trio of local notables, is equally determined as he heads to the meeting. “We want guarantees, we want the presence of an international contingent for a real peacekeeping operation,” he says.
An agreement was signed between Khartoum and the main faction of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement on May 5 in Abuja, raising hopes of an end to the more than three-year-old civil conflict in Darfur. Thousands of people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in the scorched earth campaign led by the government and its proxy militia in response to an uprising by rebels demanding a bigger share of the country’s resources.
