Khartoum

Sudanese leaders on Thursday pleaded for the rioting in the capital and other cities to end as the death toll from this week’s unrest rose to 130. The trouble in Khartoum and other cities, sparked by the death of the vice-president, John Garang, exposed the racial and religious tensions that threaten to divide the country, which has just come out of a lengthy civil war.

Fearful residents fled the centre of Khartoum on Wednesday as armed gangs roamed the streets in a third day of violence that threatened to undermine Sudan’s tenuous north-south peace deal struck six months ago. Leaders called for calm to prevent the revival of a 20-year civil war.

Violence broke out for a second day in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, on Tuesday after a morning of tense calm, a day after 36 people were killed in furious riots sparked by the death of Sudanese vice-president and former southern rebel leader John Garang. ”Where is the government? Where are the police?” asked a newspaper editor.

Security forces restored a tense calm to the Sudanese capital on Tuesday, a day after 36 people were killed in bloody riots sparked by the death of Sudanese vice-president and former southern rebel leader John Garang. Three days of national mourning were declared following his death, but it was not immediately clear when or where his funeral will be held.

Several people were killed and many others were wounded on Monday in rioting that broke out in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, following the announcement of southern leader John Garang’s death in an air crash, a Khartoum-based diplomat said. Anti-Arab riots also erupted on Monday in Juba, the main city in southern Sudan.

The Sudanese government was forced to apologise to the United States secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, on Thursday after a series of scuffles between her entourage and Sudanese security. Officials and reporters travelling with Rice to Khartoum were initially prevented from entering the compound of the president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

Sudan plans to lodge a protest with the United Nations against Eritrea, accusing it of seeking to stoke instability after a rebel offensive in the east of the country. Opposition rebels launched an offensive in eastern Sudan’s Red Sea State last week in an operation Khartoum said was carried out with the complicity of neighbouring Eritrea.

The United Nations took over Monday the monitoring of the ceasefire in the Nuba mountains, whose people found themselves wedged between the two sides of the civil war who signed a peace accord earlier this year, the world body said. Squeezed between the pro-government northerners and the pro-rebel southerners, more than half of the local population fled.

Sudanese authorities have charged one member of Médécins sans Frontières with spreading false information and detained a second after their agency spoke out about alleged rape cases in Darfur.

Omnia was nine years old the day she was forced on to a cold metal table by her mother and grandmother and circumcised by a stranger. Now 22, she has never forgotten the incident. ”Before I knew what was happening she was cutting me, and I started screaming … The stranger told me, ‘If you scream you will bleed and I will have to tie you. So don’t scream.”’

Sudanese authorities on Saturday shut down the Khartoum Monitor, a newspaper located in Arkawait town near the capital, Khartoum, following a disagreement over two articles that the paper had planned to publish. ”The government is trying to censor us, and we are fighting,” said the paper’s editor-in-chief.

Scores of Sudanese gathered on Thursday in front of a courthouse to demand a death sentence for the editor of a daily newspaper who is accused of insulting Islam’s prophet. Mohamed Taha Mohamed Ahmed, editor of the independent and pro-Islamist Al Wifaq, is standing trial for republishing an article from the internet that questioned the parentage of the Prophet Muhammad.

Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir vowed on Saturday not to hand over any of his countrymen to a foreign court, after the United Nations cleared the way for Darfur war crimes suspects to be tried by the International Criminal Court. About 300 000 people have died in more than two years of conflict in Darfur.

A spelling mistake in a United States Congress transcript and the name of a food scare gripping Britain are the latest quirky twists to have fuelled anti-Western paranoia in Sudan, currently under huge international pressure over the violence in Darfur. Minister of Agriculture Majub al-Khalifa Ahmed has accused the United States of being ”the state of the devil”.

The Sudanese government voiced its displeasure on Wednesday at the latest United States proposition for sanctions over Khartoum’s handling of the crisis in Darfur. A Sudanese official said the US State Department Adviser for Sudan, Charles Snyder, had promised that the draft resolution proposing sanctions would be ”mitigated”.

Sudan reiterated on Tuesday that those suspected of committing human rights abuses in the troubled western region of Darfur should be tried by its own courts, as a top United States diplomat started a visit to the country. To put on trial ”any Sudanese abroad is out of the question and impossible”, said Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail.

African Union-brokered talks to end violence in Sudan’s western Darfur region will resume at the end of February, a leading official from Sudan’s ruling party said on Monday. However, AU spokesperson Jean Baptiste Natama said from Khartoum that he has not received any indication of a scheduled resumption of talks.

Unidentified gunmen shot at African Union observers while they were investigating reports that the Sudanese air force had bombed villages in the country’s volatile Darfur region, an official said on Tuesday. The attacks were the latest in a spate of incidents in South Darfur state as violence continues unabated in the vast western region of the country.

An official Sudanese committee of inquiry has determined that serious human rights abuses have been committed in the troubled Darfur region but rejected claims of ethnic cleansing and systematic rape. The committee report, unveiled on Wednesday, said: ”What had happened in Darfur … did not constitute a genocide crime.”

The United Nations said on Friday the Sudan government and Darfur rebels have responded positively to a temporary ceasefire plea to allow a planned polio vaccination campaign to go ahead next week. But Sudan’s Foreign Minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, raised fears that rebel groups fighting government forces in Sudan’s western Darfur region are planning to launch attacks ahead of Sunday’s peace deal signing ceremony to end the country’s 21 year southern civil war.

Sudan accused ethnic minority rebels in the Darfur region on Friday of trying to sabotage peace with the south by stepping up operations ahead of the signing of a final deal with southern rebels. Security authorities have uncovered a ”subversive plot”, claimed Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail, quoted by the state-run Sudan News Agency.

Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir is seeking to extend a state of emergency for another year because of the conflict in Darfur and security problems in other areas of the country. Beshir has gone to the national assembly to secure a renewal of the emergency laws, which are due to expire on December 31, as well as a six-month extension of Parliament’s term.

Sudan has told the local director of the British aid group Oxfam that while his expulsion has been postponed, he must leave the country to fulfill the requirements of his exit visa. This week, the government gave the directors of Oxfam and Save the Children in the UK 48 hours to leave Sudan, accusing them of issuing statements that sent ”signals of support” to rebels in Darfur.

Sudan on Monday ordered the expulsion of the directors of two British-based humanitarian organisations for their statements on the Darfur crisis. The Humanitarian Affairs Commission said the program directors of Save the Children UK and Oxfam International had violated the laws on non-intervention in the country’s political, ethnic or sectarian issues.

A state of emergency has been declared in Sudan’s North Darfur state because of attacks by rebels in which many people have died, a Sudanese government newspaper said Tuesday. The official Al Anbaa daily said local governor Osman Yusuf Kibir declared the state of emergency across north Darfur and a curfew in the wake of ”a grave military escalation by the rebels”.

Escalating violence in Sudan’s western Darfur region has hindered food deliveries to several parts of the region, where displaced people are in urgent need of help, the United Nations World Food Programme said on Tuesday. Nearly 200 000 needy people have been cut off from UN assistance during the past weeks.

Darfur rebels killed a mayor, abducted 10 children and injured four police officers in fresh unrest in the troubled western region of Sudan, news reports and police said on Friday. Local authorities have reported the incident to the African Union ceasefire commission charged with monitoring a fragile truce in Darfur.