ADDIS ABABA, 5 July 2004 — Sudan has started disarming Arab militias accused of sowing death and terror in its western region of Darfur and is confident the process will proceed smoothly, Foreign Minster Mustafa Osman Ismail said yesterday.
“It is under way,” Ismail said, following his government’s pledge on Saturday to disarm the Arab “Janjaweed” fighters responsible for uprooting more than one million people and creating what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
But rebels said the operation was a cover for preparations for a new wave of ethnic cleansing. They said a large government force was being mobilized in the regional capital.
Ismail said a joint commission agreed during last week’s visit to the region by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan would verify the disarmament of the militia. “We are making real progress,” he told Reuters.
The Darfur crisis has taken center stage ahead of this week’s summit of the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa, where the top AU official yesterday warned that Sudan faced a worsening humanitarian crisis unless the militias were stopped.
Najeeb Al-Kheir Abdul Wahab, Sudan’s state minister for foreign affairs, said police and army units were conducting the disarmament. “We have collected weapons by force,” Abdul Wahab said. “The process of general and complete disarmament is under way under effective government control.”
Sudan’s promise has been greeted with skepticism by some human rights groups, which have joined US officials in accusing the militia of carrying out ethnic cleansing campaign against black Africans.
Underlining that skepticism, the rebel Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) said it feared Khartoum planned a new offensive from Nyala, the capital of Southern Darfur state. “The movement knows that under the cover of what is being termed ‘the disarmament of the Janjaweed’, the government is preparing a new ethnic cleansing push after the mobilization of a large force from Nyala,” the SLM said in a statement.
The SLM is one of two main rebel groups in the remote region, where Arab nomadic tribes have traditionally vied with African farming communities for scare resources.
The rebels accuse the government of neglecting the poor region and arming the Janjaweed to loot and burn African villages, a charge Khartoum denies.
AU head Alpha Oumar Konare said all sides in the Darfur crisis had agreed to meet at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa on July 15. But Sudanese officials in Khartoum said peace talks should be held in Chad, where a cease-fire with rebels was reached in April, not Ethiopia.
“Negotiations need to be in N’Djamena,” Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party Secretary-General Ibrahim Ahmed Omar told the Sudan Media Centre news agency yesterday.
The two main Darfur rebel groups said they would only take part in talks once the Janjaweed had been disarmed.
The rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) also said it would not take part unless the government abided by the April truce. Both sides have accused the other of violations.
