KHARTOUM, 11 October 2007 — Fighting has erupted between the only Darfur rebel group to have signed a 2006 peace accord and Sudanese troops, the UN said yesterday, after the rebels accused Khartoum of attacking a town they control.
The United Nations Mission in Sudan said that exchanges of fire took place on Tuesday between the Sudan Liberation Army faction of Minni Minnawi and the Sudanese Army near the north Darfur town of Tawila.
“The circumstances of the incident remain unclear,” UNMIS said in a statement that did not mention casualties. UN staff in the area have been evacuated to Darfur’s main town of El-Fasher, it said. Violence has been mounting in the troubled Sudanese region in the run-up to new peace negotiations set for the Libyan capital Tripoli on Oct. 27.
The latest clashes came after Minnawi’s SLA faction, the only rebel group to have signed the peace deal, had threatened to take up arms once more after it said more than 50 people were killed in a government-backed attack on the south Darfur town of Muhajariya.
“From now on, our movement will not stand by and do nothing in the face of such attacks,” Arku Suleiman Dhahia, commander in chief of the SLA said on Tuesday. “If this happens again, we go back to square one which means war and it will be worse than the one before (the peace deal was signed) 2006,” he told journalists in Khartoum.
As a result of the attack, Minnawi, now a special adviser to President Omar Bashir, cut short a visit to Darfur in which he had been trying to persuade other rebel factions to join this month’s peace conference in Libya.
The Khartoum government denied any involvement in the attack, blaming it on “clashes between tribes in the region.” UNMIS said that around 6,000 people had fled Muhajariya to seek refuge around a nearby African Union military base. “Other residents reportedly fled to neighboring villages and the surrounding areas, leaving the town, which had a population estimated at 20,000 inhabitants, completely deserted.”
Minnawi’s faction said Monday’s attack, which they said killed 45 people and destroyed half the town, was a “stab in the back of the peace deal.”
Rebels said militias mobilized by the government, known as Janjaweed, along with a small number of army soldiers were still burning villages around Muhajiriya yesterday.
“There are planes bombing in South Darfur,” said SLA Unity faction commander Abu Bakr Kadu. “The militias along with some government troops are attacking and burning civilian villages.” But the army says it was not involved in Monday’s attack.
“The Sudan Armed Forces affirmed that what is happening in the Muhajiriya area is tribal clashes between the people of the area and has no relation with the Sudanese army which took no part in it,” it said in a statement issued late on Tuesday, its first public reaction to the rebel accusations.
