The drive for peace in the devastated Sudanese region of Darfur took a tentative step nearer success on Friday with one rebel faction agreeing to sign a peace deal, although another still refused.
”Yes Mr Minni Minnawi, of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) faction, has accepted to sign the peace agreement although he expressed some reservations on power sharing,” said AU spokesperson Nouredine Mezni.
The SLM is the main insurgent group. But a smaller rebel faction, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), was still holding out.
”I have heard of it but we are not part of it. That has not changed our position,” said JEM spokesperson Mohammed Tugod.
The African Union’s year-old drive to bring peace to Darfur with a comprehensive package had begun the day in crisis with continued refusal by the rebels to sign a deal to end the three-year-old civil war.
Despite massive pressure from international mediators at talks in the Nigerian federal capital Abuja, the insurgents had defied the third of a series of 48-hour deadlines and rejected a proposed deal with the Sudanese government in Khartoum.
A spokesperson for the SLM confirmed his faction’s agreement to sign: ”The last decision we took is that we accept the AU proposal with the new changes but we need to sit with other SLM and the JEM and discuss with them,” said Self Eldin Haruon.
”We need to go together or else there is going to be a problem,” he added. ”The areas in which we need changes effected are power sharing and security arrangement.”
Meanwhile a smaller sub-group belonging to the SLM also refused to sign Friday.
One of its leaders, Abdelwahid Al-Nur, said earlier: ”We need the document to be improved upon. We are not going to sign it.”
Before the latest announcements, chief AU mediator Salim Ahmed Salim had sounded far from optimistic.
”It was rough and tough. I’m not encouraged. I think we’ve reached a point of reality,” he told reporters at Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo’s official residence in Abuja, the current venue of the peace talks.
”We’ve one consideration in mind, that is the plight of the people of Darfur. It will be a bad day for the people of Darfur if, after all the efforts made and days spent, the [rebel] movements are still wanting,” he warned.
Darfur, an arid desert region of western Sudan the size of France or Texas, erupted into civil war in early 2003 when armed local movements rebelled to demand more autonomy from the Arab-led government in Khartoum.
In response, the regime unleashed the Janjaweed militia, who launched brutal attacks against Darfur’s largely black African population. The war has caused at least 180 000 deaths and left 2,4-million people homeless.
This week senior international envoys, including US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, came to Abuja to strongarm the warring parties into a peace deal which would allow humanitarian aid to flow and elections to be held.
The Western diplomats fine-tuned the draft accord, pushing the government to offer better guarantees on the disarmament of the Janjaweed and on recruiting former rebels into the national armed forces.
Following this intervention, Obasanjo and the current AU chairperson, President Denis Sassou-Nguesso of Congo, personally hosted Thursday’s overnight session in a bid to persuade the parties to accept a deal.
But JEM spokesperson Tugod said the draft accord failed to answer his group’s demands for Darfur’s three states to be united into a single autonomous region.
”We came to the conclusion that it’s extremely difficult for us to accept this kind of document unless fundamental changes have been made … therefore we decided not to sign it,” he told reporters in Abuja.
Tugod said earlier a peace deal should include a larger provision to bring leaders from Darfur into the Sudanese presidency.
As drawn up by the AU, the proposed peace plan would call for a referendum in Darfur to decide whether to create a single administrative region, but only after fighting has halted and national elections have been held. – AFP
