AL-FASHIR, Sudan, 16 April 2004 — Rebels from Sudan’s Western Darfur region said yesterday they are unlikely to attend peace talks to end fighting described as ethnic cleansing, accusing Khartoum of violating a four-day-old truce.
Two rebel groups launched a revolt in remote Darfur last year, accusing Khartoum of neglecting the poor area and arming Arab militias to loot and burn African villages, a charge the government denies.
The foes signed a 45-day humanitarian cease-fire agreement that came into force on Sunday to allow urgent aid to reach the more than 700,000 people the United Nations says the fighting has displaced. At least 110,000 refugees have fled into Chad.
The rebel Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) said it would not attend the political talks due to reconvene on April 24 in Chad, adding it wanted Eritrea to mediate instead of President Idris Debby. Sudan has poor relations with Eritrea.
“We are definitely not going to the political talks because the government is not serious and is using the Janjaweed (Arab militias) to continue its strategy of murdering and displacing innocents,” SLM?A spokesman Musa Hamid Al-Doa said.
“We are suggesting Eritrea as the mediator,” he said. The SLM have accused the government of violating the ceasefire.
The rebel Justice and Equality Movement said they would not accept Chad as mediators for the talks and expressed doubt they would attend the April 24 meeting.
“I don’t think we are going to Chad. The Chadian President should not chair any meeting nor any of his executives,” JEM leader Khalil Ibrahim told Reuters from Paris, saying he had been denied an entry visa to attend the recent talks.
Ibrahim also echoed the SLM’s claim that government-backed Janjaweed had continued attacks, despite the humanitarian truce. A Western aid official in Al-Fashir, the capital of Northern Darfur state, said it was still not secure enough to get aid to those in need, but there was sense of a change in policy.
“There is a sense that there is a changing attitude to the Janjaweed from the military,” the official said, citing a report that a soldier had shot and killed a Janjaweed militia last week.
The SLM/A said it was restarting military action against the Janjaweed but JEM said it would respect the humanitarian ceasefire, calling for an international armed force in Darfur to enforce the truce.
“If the government continues these attacks then either the international community bring in an international army or we will break the ceasefire,” Ibrahim said. He said monitors from the African Union, to be deployed shortly, were ineffective as they had no military mandate.
Sudanese refugees who fled fierce fighting to Chad say Sudanese soldiers are preventing them from returning home and in some instances have beat back women searching for food and firewood.
There are at least 7,000 black African refugees living in crude shelters on the Chadian side of the dusty border town of Tine after being hounded out of Darfur region by bombing raids.
Aid agencies have set up camps in this remote corner of Africa to provide medical care and food, but in Tine the refugees live on pulses from the bush mixed with water.
“Some women went to get wood. The Sudanese soldiers whipped them. Even yesterday. We could see them,” teacher Bakheit Hashim, 35, said on Wednesday, gesturing across the dried-up riverbed that cuts through Tine and separates the two African nations.
Civilians have borne the brunt of the conflict in Darfur, where two rebel groups have been battling government troops and marauding horse-riding Arab militias and fear still reigns.
UN officials say more than 110,000 refugees have fled to Chad, although the data are several months old and many more sheltering just across the border have yet to be tallied.
