The prospect of peace in the Darfur province of Sudan continues to recede as rebels fighting the Khartoum government dig in their heels. African Union mediators in the Nigerian capital of Abuja granted a second 48-hour extension recently to Darfur’s warring factions to consider an 85-page draft peace pact. This after United States Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick and the United Kingdom’s Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, failed to persuade Darfur rebel groups to put pen to paper.
While Khartoum said it was ready to sign off on the compromise accord, rebels from the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) held fast, demanding concessions on security and power sharing. In a symbolic show of defiance, for the first time on Tuesday, SLA delegates arrived at the Abuja talks in military fatigues, conveying their readiness to continue taking up arms.
“As far as we are concerned, these peace talks have failed. We are only remaining here today because our political leadership opted to continue talking. I am ready to go home,” said a rebel delegate, who asked not to be named. “And if we don’t get a good compromise from the talks it means we are going back to fight for it on the ground. That’s the least you can expect.”
Some 200 000 Sudanese have fled the fighting in Darfur and sought sanctuary in the isolated desert refugee camps in eastern Chad. An equal number have died. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has described it as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and the UN Security Council has slapped travel and financial sanctions on four individuals suspected of involvement in attrocities in Darfur.
The rebels are accusing Khartoum of neglect and oppression of the people of Darfur, and of sponsoring violent attacks by the Janjaweed militia on civilians, including women and children. Khartoum denies the allegations.
A Nairobi-based analyst of Sudan, Alfred Lokuji, said the core problem was the marginalisation of all areas outside Khartoum. Lokuji, a Sudanese national, said the rebels were not making radical demands and “they don’t have any reason for making the peace deal a failure. They don’t want a separate state like the southerners; if offered the right deal, they will sign.”
He said the rebels were demanding “power be handed out to people from the region of Darfur” and not to those seconded and aligned to Khartoum. “The same thing will happen in the north, east and south. But there is a clique in Khartoum that doesn’t want to give up power.”
Phanuel Kaapama, a political scientist at the University of Namibia, believes the rebels should sign the agreement in the interests of the people they claim to represent. “They should make compromises and work towards goals that were not achieved on the battle front. They should look at other liberation movements and the compromises they made in the interests of peace and the people they represent.”
Additional reporting by Irin