N’DJAMENA, 25 September 2004 — Sudan may have to grant autonomy to Darfur to bring peace to the vast region where 1.4 million people have been displaced by fighting and 50,000 have died, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said yesterday.
Ruud Lubbers, the top UN official for refugees, told reporters there was no sign of a political solution in talks between the government and rebels that collapsed in Nigeria earlier this month.
“It’s clear there has to be some partition of power in Darfur,” he said.
Asked whether that meant autonomy, he said: “Yes.”
Lubbers, who was in Chad’s capital at the start of a five-day visit to Chad and Sudan, said the suggestion of greater self rule is controversial coming from a UN diplomat.
“But I have learned throughout the years to speak my mind,” he told the BBC.
Sudan, which has previously said it envisaged some form of autonomy for Darfur, is under international pressure to solve not only that crisis but a 20-year-old civil war in the south that has claimed more than 2 million lives.
Peace talks on the southern war are due to reopen in the Kenyan town of Naivasha on Oct. 7. Negotiations in Abuja, Nigeria, on Darfur are due to reconvene in October after collapsing this month with both sides far apart on key issues.
If the talks fail to achieve political solutions, the top US envoy to Sudan said yesterday it could encourage more Sudanese factions to take up arms to get their way.
“This is a formula that could lead us, in the worst case, to a Somalia-like situation,” Charles Snyder, the State Department’s senior representative told reporters in Nairobi. “I don’t think that is a probability. I think if everything went wrong, it’s a possibility.”
Lubbers said one of the aims of the trip, especially the Sudanese leg, was to try to stabilize the situation and ensure protection for people displaced in violence the United States has called genocide.
Rebels took up arms against the government in western Sudan in early 2003 charging Khartoum had neglected the region. Arab militias, which critics say were backed by the government and have long competed with the settled population for land, went on a rampage, setting fire to villages, killing, raping and driving people off their land.
The United Nations estimates up to 50,000 people have died in conflict since the fighting began, and more than a million have been force to flee their homes, with about 200,000 crossing the border into Chad.
Last week, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution calling for deployment of a large African Union force to monitor a shaky ceasefire agreed in April between rebels and the government. It also threatened possible sanctions against Khartoum if it did not rein in the so-called Janjaweed militias.
Nigerian President and AU chairman Olusegun Obasanjo told the United Nations in New York on Thursday that the 53-nation AU would decide by early October if it could mobilize troops, called for by a UN Security Council resolution last week.
He appealed for $200 million from wealthy nations to fund logistics.
The US Senate on Thursday approved a bill providing $75 million, and Canada has offered the equivalent of $16 million.
