KHARTOUM, 8 August 2004 — Sudan will accept African troops to protect observers in its troubled western Darfur region, but underlined any peacekeeping role would be limited to Sudanese forces, Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said yesterday.
Ismail also said he had signed a Sudanese-UN pact pledging safe areas for up to 1 million African villagers uprooted by fighting in remote Darfur, which UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan sent to Security Council members on Friday. “We have to make a distinction between three categories. The presence of observers, the presence of protection forces for those observers and the presence of peacekeeping forces,” Ismail told reporters in Khartoum when asked whether Sudan would accept African peacekeepers.
“We don’t have a problem with either the first or the second categories. As far as the third category is concerned ... this is the responsibility of the Sudanese forces.” He added that Darfur, which the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, was a regional problem and Sudan was discussing it with bodies such as the African Union and the Arab League, due to hold an emergency meeting today.
The AU is proposing sending up to 2,000 troops to protect its cease-fire monitors in Darfur and to serve as peacekeepers, but has yet to send an official request to Khartoum. Sudan has about three weeks left to show the UN Security Council it is serious about disarming marauding Arab militias known as Janjaweed, or face possible sanctions.
A statement from the governor of Northern Darfur state said 210 rebels had surrendered. Rebels rebuffed the claim. “Armed insurgents from the Justice and Equality rebel Movement in Darfur delivered themselves today with all of their equipment to the military command in Tina (Tine), on the Sudanese-Chad border,” the statement from governor Osman Kebir’s office said overnight.
“The governor reiterates that the door is open to the absorption of all of the returnees from the armed insurgents in the different paths of the civil and military service and help would be given to them in the resumption of their normal lives.”
JEM Secretary-General Bahar Idriss Abu Garda said the governor’s statement was “totally wrong”. “What happened actually is the government rented six cars from the civilians inside Chad and they brought some people from inside Chad and they gave them arms contending they were from JEM,” he told Reuters from Darfur.
Abu Garda also accused the government of joint attacks with Janjaweed on civilians and rebel troops in violation of a ceasefire signed by both parties in early April. “They killed 30 people, they burned eight villages and they attacked our troops (four days ago).”
Peace talks between the Sudanese government and the two rebel movements fighting in Darfur will take place in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, on Aug. 23, AU spokesman Adam Thiam told AFP yesterday. “The peace talks between the Darfur rebels and (Sudanese) government will take place on Aug. 23 in Abuja under the auspices of the current AU chairman (Nigerian President Olusegun) Obasanjo,” Thiam said in Addis Ababa, where the AU’s headquarters are located.
“The rebels have confirmed to the chairperson that they will be represented at the highest level in their leadership (and the) government has also agreed to send a high-level delegation to participate in the peace talks,” he added.
