The Sudanese government has signed an agreement with the United Nations’s migration agency ensuring that more than one million people displaced by the 18-month Darfur conflict will have the right to return home voluntarily, but only once they feel the situation is secure enough to do so.
Signed Saturday in Khartoum, the agreement aims to ensure that no people displaced by the conflict, which has killed an estimated 30 000 people and destroyed scores of villages, will be forced by Sudanese security forces to return home before security has been restored or they are ready to go back.
The agreement is one of several measures Sudanese authorities have committed to undertaking under the Darfur Plan of Action, a framework drawn up to demonstrate to the UN Security Council that Khartoum is moving to end the conflict, which the UN says has produced the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
”We have put together something that can work,” said Brunson McKinley, director general of the UN’s Geneva-based International Organisation for Migration (IOM), adding, however, that the return of the displaced people ”is not going to be [an] easy or quick” process.
McKinley told reporters he has visited several displaced people camps in Darfur, where most people told him that they want to return home providing that security is ensured.
McKinley, Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail and an envoy for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan signed the agreement, which calls for forming a group to manage and coordinate the voluntary return of displaced people to their Darfur homes.
”Now we have a mechanism that would dispel any doubts as to whether the return of the IDPs [internally displaced persons] is voluntary or not,” Ismail stressed during the signing ceremony.
There have been allegations of Sudanese security forces trying to force displaced people living in camps dotted throughout Darfur’s three states to return home, a UN official said, adding, however, that there have been no confirmed cases of this happening.
Ismail made a call for international support, particularly from the UN and NGOs, to help enable the return home of those displaced by the conflict.
Fighting in Darfur has been raging since African rebels rose up against the government in February 2003 over what they regarded as unjust treatment by Sudanese authorities. The region’s nomadic Arab tribes have long been at odds with their African farming neighbours over dwindling resources, particularly water and usable land.
Since then, armed bands of herders, most of them pro-government Arabs, known as the Janjaweed, have been torching village after village in the sprawling, arid region. The United States and aid agencies accuse the government of backing the Janjaweed, claims Khartoum denies.
But UN spokesperson Radhia Achouri said on Friday that Sudanese authorities have acknowledged controlling some of the Janjaweed through promising to provide a list of militiamen suspected of involvement in the Darfur conflict.
The UN Security Council has given the Sudanese government until August 30 to disarm Arab militias blamed for the violence or face diplomatic and economic sanctions.
Peace talks sponsored by the African Union are scheduled to be held in Nigeria on Monday between the two African rebel groups and the Sudanese government.
The UN says the conflict has driven about 1,4-million people from their homes, many of whom are now in displaced people camps, while another 180 000 have fled into neighbouring Chad.
Under Saturday’s agreement, Sudanese authorities agreed to accept the IOM’s determination on whether people are ready to return home voluntarily and to ensure the security of the UN agency’s staff and displaced people in Darfur.
Paul Norton, the IOM’s chief in Sudan, said it is crucial that displaced people in Darfur are not forced to return home before security has been established and suitable conditions, including living arrangements, have been provided in their former homes.
”We are talking about people who have been traumatised in one way or another, but ultimately the goal is to help these people go home and get on with their lives,” Norton said in Egypt during a telephone interview. — Sapa-AP