A deadly firefight on Monday killed at least 25 people after Sudanese security forces thrust into one of the largest camps for displaced people in Darfur, witnesses and rebels said.
Reports of casualties varied wildly and there was no immediate confirmation of numbers from aid workers or United Nations officials compiling their own statistics.
The violence came just hours before Djibril Bassole, the new international mediator trying to find a political solution to end five years of war in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, was to arrive to take up his post.
Witnesses said government forces massed at dawn outside Kalma, a highly charged camp in South Darfur that is home to up to 100 000 people displaced by the conflict and which the authorities have previously wanted to empty.
Adam Mohamed, a community leader in Kalma, said 30 people were killed and 25 wounded in clashes with police before the heavy gunfire subsided.
”The government forces still surround the camp. There is no fighting now but tension is high throughout the camp and no one knows where the wounded people have been taken,” Mohamed said by telephone.
”This morning security forces surrounded Kalma camp and demanded that every IDP [internally displaced person] leave,” said Ahmed Abdel Shafie, a commander in the nebulous rebel Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), from elsewhere in Darfur.
”Later, they opened fire on the eastern side of the camp. There were many casualties. Up to now, we have 27 confirmed dead and 75 wounded.”
Five of the dead are women and two are children, he said.
He accused the government of wanting to disband IDP camps near main towns to isolate victims of the conflict after the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court sought an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir.
Another rebel commander lashed out at African Union and UN peacekeepers, who are struggling to provide security in a region broadly the size of Turkmenistan with just more than one-third of the 26 000 troops they have been promised.
”Government forces killed 25 IDPs. This happened before the eyes of the hybrid force. I urge the international community to protect IDPs,” said one commander from the SLA faction commanded by exiled leader Abdul Wahid.
Homes were torched and fires still smouldered in the camp, rebels said.
The UN-led peacekeeping operation scrapped patrols to Kalma earlier on Monday after security forces, apparently armed with an official search warrant, requested their help to hunt for weapons and wanted people in the camp.
”The Unamid leadership is closely monitoring the situation with serious concern,” spokesperson Noureddine Mezni said. ”We called off regular patrols in Kalma because it not part of our mandate to search for arms and arrest individuals.
”Shortly after we got calls from sheikhs who said those officers had already positioned themselves in the camp and that shots were fired.”
Peacekeepers have since scrambled to Kalma to try to open a safe corridor to evacuate casualties.
”A Unamid police and military force accessed the camp to assess the situation and we are prepared for possible assistance in the case of evacuating any type of casualties,” Mezni said.
International charity Médecins sans Frontières said at least 65 wounded, more than half of them women and children, were admitted to its clinic.
Police in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, said a statement would be released later. One government official denied there was any intention to order aid workers or civilians out of the camp.
”I know from NGOs working inside Kalma that there is fighting inside the camp but they didn’t give me details,” Saroor Ahmed Abdallah, head of the Humanitarian Aid Commission in Nyala, said by telephone.
The UN says that up to 300 000 people have died and more than 2,2-million fled their homes since the conflict in Darfur erupted in February 2003. Sudan says 10 000 have been killed.
The war began when ethnic minority rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Khartoum regime and state-backed Arab militias, fighting for resources and power in one of the most remote and deprived places on Earth.
The UN-brokered peace process on Darfur has stalled since talks in Libya last October were boycotted by key rebel factions.
Bassole’s appointment has been greeted with some derision because he has neither Arabic nor English in a country where most government officials and rebels speak both. — Sapa-AFP