KHARTOUM, 17 October 2004 — Sudan yesterday questioned UN estimates that up to 70,000 people had died from hunger and disease in its remote Darfur region since a rebellion began 20 months ago.
David Nabarro, head of the World Health Organization health crisis action group in Geneva, said on Friday the monthly death rate in Darfur was about 10,000, blaming malnutrition and disease. He said the figure of 70,000 did not take into account deaths from violence.
But Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said the information was not correct and when the government asked the WHO’s Khartoum office for details, they said the information had not come from them.
“When we checked with the office of the WHO here they told us they have no information. This information never came from them,” Ismail told reporters in Khartoum. “They are the ones who are on the ground here. They know what is going on.”
He said the government would investigate whether the WHO was under pressure to issue false figures. “We are not going to leave these issues until they are tackled,” he said. After years of skirmishes between Arab nomads and mostly non-Arab farmers over scarce resources in arid Darfur, rebels took up arms, accusing Khartoum of neglect and of using mounted Arab tribal militias, known as Janjaweed, to loot and burn non-Arab villages.
Meanwhile, Sudan’s government and the main southern rebel group yesterday adjourned peace talks here for the month of Ramadan, without having agreed on a permanent cease-fire or final peace deal to end Africa’s longest war, the chief mediator said.
Khartoum’s delegation, led by Vice President Ali Osman Taha, and his opposite number John Garang, leader of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army, have been meeting in the Kenyan capital since Oct. 7 to try to hammer out the final details of a peace pact to end the 21-year-old civil war in southern Sudan.
Although no final agreement was reached, “the two sides agreed that a joint SPLA-government force will be positioned in eastern Sudan after both parties pull out...” chief mediator, retired Kenyan Gen. Lazaro Sumbeiywo, told a press conference in Nairobi yesterday.
Sumbeiywo said a technical committee has been formed to negotiate issues of funding of the armed forces and the time and manner in which numerous militia groups will be “integrated into structures of the Sudan Armed Forces and the SPLA.”
The current round of talks is the latest in a series that has gone on for more than two years in Kenya. When the talks adjourned for the holy month, the government and the SPLA appeared to be very close to the finish line, having agreed to six protocols on key political issues, leaving only technical issues on a comprehensive cease-fire and security arrangements to be ironed out, the mediators said.
Garang’s SPLA took up arms in 1983 to end marginalization of the black animist and Christian south by Muslim, Arab Khartoum. Control of natural resources, especially the 250,000 barrels of oil pumped from mainly southern Sudanese soil every day, has also played a large part in the conflict that has claimed at least 1.5 million people and displaced four million others.
The protracted negotiations adjourned amid a threat of international sanctions hanging over Khartoum for its role in a separate conflict in the western region of Darfur, where up to 50,000 people have died and 1.4 million others are displaced.
Khartoum, under immense international pressure to finish the south Sudan peace pact so it can solve the Darfur crisis in the west, has said it would like to sign the agreement by December.
Washington has proposed the United Nations Security Council hold a November meeting in Nairobi to encourage both sides to finish the talks. Lower-level negotiators will continue to meet to discuss the details of putting the peace pact into practice, Sumbeiywo said. Diplomats say that includes resolving who will pay for SPLA soldiers brought into joint SPLA-Sudanese military units.
Delegates also said that both sides agreed in principle to the disbanding of militias that Khartoum funded to battle the SPLA, but are still split on whether to add them as signatories to a final peace pact.
The parties agreed to approach the militias jointly to work out how they will be disbanded and absorbed into SPLA or Sudanese forces, delegates said.
Garang and Taha had originally been scheduled to meet for only three days, and then leave the talks to delegates.
