Hostile crowds met the UN party after it landed in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, on Thursday afternoon as news of the latest violence in Darfur’s seven-year conflict started to emerge.
The reception was in marked contrast to the welcoming crowds which greeted the ambassadors on Wednesday in Juba, the capital of south Sudan, an oil-producing region preparing for a referendum on whether it should separate from the north.
The Security Council delegation, including US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, is in Sudan to push for progress in the country’s faltering peace processes in Darfur, and a separate settlement that ended decades of north-south war.
Sudan’s army spokesman told Reuters ground troops attacked rebels blocking a key road near the mountainous Jebal Marra region on Thursday morning, about 160 km (100 miles) southwest of El Fasher.
“The Sudanese army attacked the Suni area today ... and expelled the rebels from Eastern Jabel Marra,” the army’s spokesman said, without giving details of casualties.
The rebel Sudan Liberation Army told Reuters army ground and air forces had been launching ground and air assaults on their positions near Jabel Marra area for weeks, but stepped up their campaign on Thursday.
Fighting erupted in Darfur in 2003 when mostly non-Arab rebels launched a revolt, accusing the Khartoum government of neglecting the arid region.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Sudanese president Omar Bashir to face charges of masterminding genocide and war crimes during the government’s counter-insurgency campaign.
Hundreds of angry protesters lined the streets outside El Fasher airport, confining the UN delegation for a while to a compound used by Darfur’s joint UN/African Union peacekeepers.
When the Security Council convoy managed to leave, demonstrators banged their fists on their vehicles, shouting “Yes, Yes, Bashir” and other slogans.
One of the reasons for the council’s two-day visit to Darfur was “to express our concern about the continued, increased violence in Darfur,” Britain’s UN Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant told reporters.
“We’re concerned about sex violence, child soldiers, import of weapons to the region.”
South Sudan president Salva Kiir told envoys on Wednesday his region might have to hold its own independence vote if the north disrupted the referendum promised in a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of north-south civil war, said Lyall Grant.
Such a move would enrage Khartoum, which wants to keep Africa’s largest country in one piece. A senior northern official described Kiir’s statement as “unacceptable.”
Southerners are about three months away from a referendum on whether they should form Africa’s newest country or stay in Sudan. Analysts have warned the two sides may revert to war.
Preparations for the vote are behind schedule and the south has repeatedly accused the north of trying to delay the ballot to keep control of the region’s oil, a charge Khartoum denies.
