Khartoum

Khartoum said on Monday it will next week start disarming militias accused of carrying out atrocities in the western Darfur region. The process of disarming all militias will ”begin on May 15 and President Omar al-Beshir has already instructed the armed forces to commence”, said Majzoub al-Khalifa Ahmed, Khartoum’s chief negotiator on Darfur.

The Sudanese foreign ministry will ask the Chadian ambassador to explain his government’s decision to severe diplomatic relations with Khartoum, a spokesperson said on Friday. Earlier on Friday, Chadian President Idriss Déby said in N’djamena his country was breaking ties with neighbouring Sudan, which he has accused of backing a rebel bid to topple him.

The African Union mission in Sudan is launching a probe into allegations that AU troops in Darfur sexually abused Darfuri women. The allegations were aired on British television channel four and charge that AU peacekeepers paid displaced Darfuri girls as young as 11-years-old for sex.

An official probe into the helicopter crash that killed former south Sudanese leader John Garang last year concluded the pilot was to blame, a member of the investigation panel said on Wednesday. Siraj al-Din Hamid told reporters in Khartoum that the final report was submitted to Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir on Tuesday night.

Ilham could not hold back the tears as she recounted how her six-year-old sister Eglal bled to death under the knife of a traditional midwife circumcising her, even though it happened way back in 1980. Twenty-six years later, young girls in the poverty-stricken African country are still subjected to this ancient tradition, branded by human rights organisations as ”female genital mutilation or cutting” (FGM).

The International Red Cross said on Wednesday that a total of 4 094 cases of cholera, including 79 deaths, were reported in the southern Sudanese city of Juba since the outbreak of the disease there last month. ”As of March 7, the total number of cases of acute watery diarrhea reported in Juba was 4 094.”

A culture of impunity still reigns in Sudan’s western Darfur region, and a special Sudanese court set up to try perpetrators of war crimes in the three-year-old Darfur conflict has failed to prosecute any suspected war criminals, according to a United Nations envoy in Khartoum.

The South Darfur police chief said on Sunday that 18 rebels had been killed and more than 50 wounded while two government troops died and nine others were wounded in a recent attack by rebels on Shiairyah town in South Darfur state. There was no independent confirmation of the statement by police chief, Major General Abdin al-Tahir, who was quoted by the state-run Sudanese Media Centre.

African leaders on Tuesday named Congo as the chair of the African Union and agreed that Sudan would take over the leadership of the 53-nation body in 2007, according to a text issued at a summit in Khartoum. Sudan on Monday offered to withdraw its bid to head the AU to avoid a split among leaders of the 53-nation body.

Sudan on Monday offered to withdraw its bid to head the African Union to avoid a split among leaders of the 53-nation body gathered in Khartoum for a summit. The bid from President Omar el-Beshir, who seized power in a 1989 coup, caused unease as the AU is mediating talks to end the bloodshed in Darfur.

African leaders on Monday opened a summit in Khartoum dominated by a controversial bid from host country Sudan to head the African Union as the pan-African body seeks to end the bloodshed in Darfur. The campaign by Sudan to take over the chairmanship of the 53-nation AU could derail peace efforts in Sudan’s western Darfur region.

A rebel group in eastern Sudan has accused the army of launching an attack on Wednesday on its camps in the Hamesh Koreb region, sparking clashes that left casualties. ”Troops backed by warplanes attacked our camps in Hamesh Koreb,” near the border with Eritrea, the secretary general of the Beja Congress said.

The largest rebel group in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region appeared set to split on Wednesday, as its more militant wing readied to elect new leaders at a meeting boycotted by the incumbent president. ”There will be an election for new leaders,” said Mahjub Hussein, a London-based spokesperson for the Sudan Liberation Movement.

Sudan and Eritrea hailed on Friday a major improvement in bilateral relations strained by a decade of mutual accusations of support for each other’s opposition groups. ”The two sides have reached a breakthrough after four days of strenuous talks, ending more than 10 years of estrangement that were not in the interest of the two neighbours and their brotherly peoples,” said Sudanese foreign ministry spokesperson Jamal Mohammed Ibrahim.

Most of the 40 African Union (AU) peacekeepers taken hostage by rebels in western Sudan’s troubled Darfur region are believed to have been freed, an AU official said on Monday. The AU mission’s commander in chief Festus Owkonko was heading to Tine, where the abductions took place on Sunday near the border with Chad, to assess the situation.

Dissident rebels kidnapped a group of African Union (AU) personnel and a monitor from the United States in Sudan’s powder keg western Darfur region, AU and US officials said, but some of the hostages were later released. The abductions near Sudan’s western border with Chad on Sunday came a day after two African Union troops were killed by another rebel group.

Sudan’s first post-war national unity government was sworn in on Thursday at a ceremony attended by President Omar al-Beshir, eight months after a peace deal that ended Africa’s longest-running conflict. But the new Cabinet was swiftly dismissed by the opposition as falling well short of a truly broad-based government.

Sudan’s former southern rebels threatened on Friday to seek third-party arbitration in their dispute with the ruling party over the line-up of their much-delayed national unity government. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and the ruling National Congress Party have been locked in acrimonious talks.

A severe jet fuel shortage has forced the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to cut its deliveries in southern Sudan by half at the height of the hunger season. ”This could not have happened at a worse time for the people of Sudan,” said WFP country director Ramiro Lopes da Silva.

Sudan’s new southern leader Salva Kiir issued a stark warning to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), urging the Ugandan rebels to reach a rapid peace deal with Kampala or leave Sudan at once. ”The LRA have to reach a settlement to their problem with the Ugandan government, if not, they have to leave the south, otherwise we are going to find other solutions,” he said.

Salva Kiir was sworn in as Sudan’s First Vice-President on Thursday, facing the enormous tasks of implementing a landmark peace deal and carrying on the legacy of his charismatic predecessor John Garang. The ceremony at Khartoum’s Republican Palace was brief and low-key compared with Garang’s lavish swearing-in.

The United Nations said on Wednesday that 17 bodies had been recovered from the site of the late Sudanese southern rebel John Garang’s helicopter crash — three more than originally reported. ”The last figure that I saw in our report was 17,” said Radhia Achouri, a spokesperson for UN special envoy for Sudan Jan Pronk.

Sudan said on Monday it had formed a committee to probe the death of first vice president and former rebel leader John Garang when a Ugandan helicopter crashed on its way to south Sudan from Uganda. ”A higher national committee has been formed to investigate the crash of Dr John Garang’s aircraft in southern Sudan,” Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail told reporters in Khartoum.

The Sudanese president has ordered an investigation into deadly riots that killed more than 130 people across Sudan in the days following the death of first Vice President John Garang in a helicopter crash, state media reported on Monday. The investigation team is to report back to the president within two weeks.