African leaders emerged from their first attempt at brokering peace in Sudan’s Darfur region without a major development on Sunday, though Sudan’s lead negotiator said the groups made ”some progress”.
Dennis Sassou-Nguesso, Congo’s President and current head of the 53-nation African Union, had teamed up with Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo to try to push the long-running talks toward a resolution. They met with Sudanese Vice-President Ali Osman Taha, rebel leaders and mediators through the night, emerging only early on Sunday morning.
The talks aim to end more than three years of deadly civil war that has left more than 180 000 people dead in western Sudan and driven millions more from their homes.
More than 18 months of talks in Abuja between two main Darfur rebel groups and the Sudanese government have yet to yield a breakthrough to end the fighting that created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
”It was purely exploratory,” Obasanjo told reporters after the meeting. ”We will meet again to see how we can close the gap.”
The leader of the Sudanese negotiating team, Majzoub al Khalifa, said they made ”some progress” on the key outstanding issues of how to share wealth and power and arrange security. He told reporters Taha will remain in Abuja for several days more to meet negotiators and the rebels.
Abdulwahid Al Nur, a leader of the main Darfur rebel group, the Sudanese Liberation Movement, said his group and the smaller Justice and Equality Movement have already made clear their joint position on the sticking points.
”We believe if they [the Sudanese government] have really come for peace, a decision will be taken,” Nur said, without elaborating.
Decades of low-level tribal clashes over land and water in Darfur erupted into large-scale violence in early 2003 when ethnic African tribes took up arms, accusing the East African nation’s Arab-dominated central government of neglect.
The central government is accused of responding by unleashing Arab tribal militias known as Janjaweed to murder and rape civilians and lay waste to villages.
The Sudanese government denies backing the Janjaweed. ‒ Sapa-AP