KHARTOUM, 21 December 2004 - A previously unknown rebel group said on Monday it had attacked a South Darfur oil pumping station as African Union truce monitors suspended operations in the area after one of their helicopters came under fire.
“To my knowledge, this suspension is only in South Darfur state,” said a senior AU official, asked about a report that the observers had called off monitoring throughout the region. South Darfur state makes up about one-third of the Darfur region.
The official, who asked not to be named, did not say how long the suspension would last. The AU has more than 800 troops in Darfur, trying to monitor ceasefire violations in the region the size of France. It has also been mediating in faltering peace talks in Nigeria between the Sudanese government and the rebels.
Each side has regularly accused the other of violating an April cease-fire, and it was not clear who fired at the helicopter. At the talks in the Nigerian capital Abuja, Libyan peace brokers met rebel and Sudanese government delegates to try to persuade them to stop fighting in Darfur and resume negotiations.
The Darfur rebellion began last year, when rebels accused Khartoum of neglecting the arid western region where tribal tensions have long simmered over scarce resources. The fighting has displaced 1.6 million people and killed tens of thousands.
The US State Department called on both sides to cooperate. “We urge both sides in the strongest terms to cooperate fully with international humanitarian efforts,” said spokesman Richard Boucher. “The United States and the international community, including the United Nations, speak with one voice on the crisis in Darfur.
Rebel negotiators in Abuja said they doubted whether the Libyans would be able to revive the talks, previously mediated by the 53-member African Union.
“We met the Libyan team today and we made our demands known to them. They said they will talk to the Sudan government and get back to us,” Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) official Mansour Arbab told Reuters.
The SLM and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) quit the Abuja talks soon after they resumed eight days ago, saying government forces must return to positions they held before the Ndjamena agreement in April for negotiations to restart.
“Right now we are not optimistic that the Sudan government will listen to the Libyans because they have defied everybody before, including the AU,” JEM spokesman Ahmed Adam told Reuters.
AU spokesman Assane Ba said the pan-African body would give Libya more time to persuade the sides to resume negotiations and was not planning to report the Darfur situation to the UN Security Council as JEM wants.
The Sudanese government said on Sunday it would immediately cease all hostilities in the area of Labado, 65 km (40 miles) east of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state.
But AU officials said the attack on the helicopter was evidence the cease-fire between the government and rebels in the Labado area was not holding. They said the attack would make it harder for the AU to tell whether there was fighting in the area. Both main rebel groups corroborated a claim by the Sudanese National Movement for the Eradication of Marginalization that it attacked the small Sharif oil pumping station on Saturday.
The claim underlined the fragmented state of Africa’s largest nation. “This was our first military operation and we chose the oil fields because this is the wealth of Sudan, which this government is not sharing with all of its people,” said leader Ali Abdel Rahim El-Shindy, speaking to Reuters.
