KHARTOUM, 31 October 2003 — Talks held in Chad to end a rebellion in Sudan’s western state of Darfur reached a deadlock on Tuesday that Khartoum has blamed on the rebels and they have blamed on the government and the Chadians. The government and the rebel Sudan Liberation Army accused each other of putting forward unacceptable conditions for direct talks to resume in the eastern Chadian town of Abeche.
The government ruled out the deployment of the international monitors in Darfur, while the SLA accused Khartoum of seeking to impose a deal that provides for its dissolution even before the start of the negotiations.
“Sending international monitors to Darfur is ruled out because this will be an internationalization of the problem,” the official Al-Anbaa daily quoted Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail as saying.
Khartoum had from the outset decided to solve the Darfur problem “in a bilateral framework” with the SLA, he said, and had accepted Chadian good offices “in view of the mutual security concerns and the tribal inter-relationship between the two countries.”
SLA Secretary-General Mani Arkoi Minawi said the government’s delegation has put forward a “diktat” at the talks in Abeche, some 300 kilometers from the Sudanese border. “They said our delegation should sign a paper before resuming the direct talks,” Minawi told AFP in Cairo by telephone from Darfur. “This is a diktat,” he added.
He said the government paper “grants general amnesty for the SLA and provides for the SLA members to dissolve in the Sudanese Army.” “That is tantamount to ending our movement without a fight,” he said.
Reporting from talks in Abeche, in neighboring Chad, Khartoum newspapers said the two sides have not sat together at the negotiating table since Saturday and are conducting proximity talks with a Chadian mediator shuttling between the two delegations.
Minawi also accused “the Chadian mediator of not being honest,” by supporting the government paper. He said the Chadians also imposed a black out on the SLA delegates, preventing them from contacting the media or “international parties.”
Last Thursday, Minawi voiced fears that his group will be wiped out by government troops if Khartoum reaches an agreement ending its 20-year war with the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. “It will be a way for the government to regroup to suppress the other marginalized areas, including the west and our movement in particular,” he said.
The government delegation in Abeche is led by a senior Interior Ministry official, Abdullah Abdul Karim, officials in Khartoum said. The SLA delegation is headed by one of its leaders, Abdullah Hasaballah Domee, Minawi said.
Meanwhile, Islamist leader Hassan Turabi on Wednesday said he would meet soon with southern rebel leader John Garang. “Arrangements and contacts are under way for my meeting with Dr. John Garang shortly,” Turabi told reporters here.
Turabi added that he considered democracy a prerequisite to peace, saying that peace “will collapse in the absence of a genuine democracy.” He spoke to reporters following a meeting with a committee of 10 that is seeking national reconciliation to coincide with an eventual end to Sudan’s 20-year-old civil war.
