Fighting has erupted between the only Darfur rebel group to have signed a 2006 peace accord and Sudanese troops, the United Nations said on Wednesday after the rebels accused Khartoum of attacking a town the rebels control.
The United Nations mission in Sudan said that exchanges of fire took place on Tuesday between the Sudan Liberation Army faction of Minni Minawi and the Sudanese army near the north Darfur town of Tawila.
”The circumstances of the incident remain unclear,” The UN said in a statement that did not mention casualties. UN staff in the area have been evacuated to Darfur’s main town of El-Fasher, it said.
Violence has been mounting in the troubled Sudanese region in the run-up to new peace negotiations set for the Libyan capital, Tripoli, on October 27.
The latest clashes came after Minawi’s Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) faction, the only rebel group to have signed the peace deal, had threatened to take up arms once more after it said more than 50 people were killed in a government-backed attack on the south Darfur town of Muhajariya.
”From now on, our movement will not stand by and do nothing in the face of such attacks,” Arku Suleiman Dhahia, commander in chief of the SLA said on Tuesday.
”If this happens again, we go back to square one, which means war and it will be worse than the one before [the peace deal was signed] 2006,” he told journalists in Khartoum.
As a result of the attack, Minawi, now a special adviser to President Omar al-Bashir, cut short a visit to Darfur in which he had been trying to persuade other rebel factions to join this month’s peace conference in Libya.
The Khartoum government denied any involvement in the attack, blaming it on ”clashes between tribes in the region”.
The UN said that about 6 000 people had fled Muhajariya to seek refuge around a nearby African Union military base.
”Other residents reportedly fled to neighbouring villages and the surrounding areas, leaving the town, which had a population estimated at 20 000 inhabitants, completely deserted.”
It said that a large number of shops and houses in Muhajariya had been burnt to the ground. — Sapa-AFP