KHARTOUM, 1 January 2004 — A Sudanese opposition Islamist party said yesterday the government had arrested three of its leaders and 22 other members for having links to rebels in the western Darfur region of Africa’s largest country. Witnesses also said Sudanese authorities raided a Khartoum university dormitory yesterday and arrested 50 members of the politically active Darfur Students’ Union there.
The Popular National Congress (PNC) party led by prominent Islamist Hassan Turabi denied any direct contact with two main Darfur rebel groups.
The groups launched a revolt in February, accusing Khartoum of marginalizing the remote area. The United Nations says the Darfur strife has displaced more than 600,000 people and warns of a humanitarian crisis there.
“The government arrested these people...because they are from the same tribe as the rebels,” PNC official Mohamed Al-Amin Khalifa told Reuters, adding that he felt Khartoum wanted to re-arrest Turabi but held back because of international pressure.
Turabi, a former ally in President Omar Bashir’s Islamist government, was released in October after two and a half years of detention for crimes against the state. Government officials declined to comment on the arrests but the state-owned Al-Anbaa newspaper quoted Bashir yesterday as saying Khartoum’s priority was to “wipe out the rebels”.
But the PNC said the government was wrong to target it because it offered the best chance of finding a peace deal, thanks to historical links to the Darfur-based rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and leaders who came from the region. Khalifa said JEM was formed after splitting from the PNC in 1999. But JEM denied the claim.
“We are an independent group with no links at all with the PNC or Turabi,” JEM Chairman Khalil Ibrahim told Reuters. The other main Darfur rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), signed a truce with Khartoum in September but peace talks broke down earlier this month with both sides blaming each other. The SLA also said JEM was allied to Turabi’s party.
Meanwhile, the government and the main rebel group have made progress on three disputed regions at talks in Kenya aimed at ending two decades of war in the country, mediators said
Sudan’s Vice President Ali Osman Taha and rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) head John Garang are locked in negotiations on the status of the three disputed areas of Abyei, southern Blue Nile State and the Nuba Mountains. The SPLA claims those areas although they are not geographically part of the south, where the SPLA is based.
“The two sides have already agreed on some issues on the Nuba Mountains and southern Blue Nile, such as that they will become autonomous, have their own governor, supervise their own education, collect their own revenue,” a source who asked not to be named told AFP.
“On Abyei, the government wants a referendum while the SPLA wants it to return to the south, saying it was annexed, but the leaders are yet to discuss that,” said the source, who spoke to AFP from the talks venue in the Kenyan town of Naivasha.
