Khartoum

Sudan’s health minister has announced an Aids-free policy will be applied to African Union troops, tasked with monitoring a ceasefire deal in crisis-hit Darfur, who have earned a steamy reputation for assiduous off-duty mingling. He said the measure is purely precautionary and aimed at ”safeguarding the health of the people of Darfur”.

Sudan charged on Thursday that it is being harassed by the United Nations over the Darfur crisis because the world body is powerless to change the situation in Iraq or the Palestinian territories. ”The UN has lost its sense of direction in applying the international charter,” Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail told reporters.

The troubled western Sudan region of Darfur is facing another catastrophe with a growing number of animal deaths, including donkeys, in the region where more than 70 000 people have died in a major humanitarian crisis. Donkeys are economically vital for the impoverished people of Darfur.

Sudan’s government pledged on Saturday to cooperate with a United Nations panel set up to determine whether genocide has taken place in the troubled region of Darfur where thousands of people have been killed during a 19-month-old revolt. Sudan has consistently been accused of obstructing aid and efforts to resolve the crisis in Darfur.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair held talks in Sudan on Wednesday to pressure the country’s leaders into taking action over the humanitarian crisis in war-torn Darfur. Blair, who underwent an operation to correct a heart flutter only five days earlier, was greeted at the presidential palace in Khartoum by Vice President Ali Osman Taha.

The Sudanese government has again denied it will grant autonomy to any state in northern Sudan, while criticising the chief of the United Nations refugee agency chief for calling for autonomy in the war-torn Darfur region, a press report said on Thursday.

Sudan has arrested scores of Islamist militants from the party of detained opposition leader Hassan Turabi, accusing them of subversion and arms trafficking involving an unnamed neighbouring country. Security forces nabbed Popular Congress party officials in the latest crackdown by the government against its rivals.

Sudan is ready to discuss the deployment of additional African Union monitors in Darfur in response to calls for an increased international presence in the troubled western region — but is still opposed to the deployment in Darfur of foreign peacekeepers with a broader mandate than AU observers monitoring ceasefire violations.

The Sudanese government has signed an agreement with the United Nations’s migration agency ensuring that more than one million people displaced by the 18-month Darfur conflict will have the right to return home voluntarily, but only once they feel the situation is secure enough to do so.

Sudanese authorities have restored aid deliveries to a camp for 90 000 displaced people in Darfur, United Nations officials said, three days after soldiers reportedly closed the camp following a mob killing of an alleged pro-government militiaman. More than 400 Sudanese fled Darfur to Chad during the weekend, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ spokesperson for east Chad said on Monday.

Uncertainty prevailed on Friday over efforts to find a negotiated end to the armed conflict and humanitarian crisis in Sudan’s western Darfur region as rebels threatened to stay away from talks in Nigeria. At the same time a diplomat in Ndjamena, the capital of Chad, said informal peace talks have begun in the Libyan town of Sirte.

Tens of thousands of people marched on United Nations offices in Khartoum on Wednesday to protest last week’s Security Council resolution on Darfur, rejecting any foreign intervention in the war-torn province. One contingent of youths was wearing black shirts and red headbands marked ”Martyrs Brigades”.

Sudan on Friday rejected as ”inappropriate” a resolution adopted by the United Nations Security Council giving it one month to rein in militias blamed for atrocities in the Darfur region or face international action. ”The resolution is inappropriate,” said government spokesperson Al-Zahawe Ibrahim Malik

An envoy of the African Union’s chairperson, Nigerian President Olesegun Obasanjo, views the Darfur problem as an internal African issue to be solved by the AU alone, Sudanese media reported on Wednesday. ”The Darfur problem is a purely African one that has to be resolved by the AU,” General Abdulsalami Abubakar said.

Ten Janjaweed militiamen have been sentenced to six years in jail and each will have his right hand and left leg amputated in the first conviction by a special tribunal in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region, the Sudanese Media Centre reported on Monday. The men were convicted of committing crimes against the western region’s black population.

The Sudanese government said on Friday it will try anyone who violates human rights in Darfur, where 17 months of fighting involving African rebels, Arab militiamen and government troops has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced more than a million.

Sudanese security services have banned a demonstration planned to coincide with visits by United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and United Nationa Secretary General Kofi Annan, a government newspaper reported on Tuesday. The demonstration was to be staged primarily to protest alleged ”US and UN double standards”.

Sudanese government troops and a force of about 600 rebels have clashed in Darfur region despite a ceasefire deal between the two sides, the Sudanese Media Centre reported on Wednesday. The centre said both sides suffered casualties in the fighting that, it said, started when rebels attacked government forces .

The leader of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army, John Garang, has told President Omar al-Beshir that he hopes to visit Khartoum ”soon”, reports said on Monday. ”God willing, we will come soon to your place in Khartoum. We are not against Islam and Arabs,” Sudanese media quoted Garang as saying.

Sudan has eased restrictions on humanitarian groups trying to assist in the troubled region of Darfur, according to a statement released on Friday. The United Nations and a number of aid organisations have complained of rejections or delays in receiving travel permits to Darfur, where more than a year of fighting has displaced almost one-million people and led to a major humanitarian crisis.

A 45-day ceasefire agreement between the warring parties in Sudan’s western Darfur region is in question as the parties to the conflict have begun blaming each other for violating the truce they signed on Thursday. Reports from Darfur on Tuesday said three people were wounded when a passenger bus was fired on by an armed group.

Sudan rejected on Thursday world pressure, led by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, for international intervention in the war-torn western region of Darfur, insisting it is taking its own steps to rein in government-sponsored militias accused of ethnic cleansing.

About 10 Sudanese army officers have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in a military coup attempt apparently related to the ongoing conflict in west Sudan’s Darfur region, an official close to the government said on Tuesday. The officers arrested are thought to belong to the Islamist opposition Popular Congress.

Six leaders of an Arab tribe have been killed in an attack by insurgents in western Sudan’s South Darfur state, the governor, General Adam Hamid Mussa, said on Wednesday. Mussa said a group of ”armed outlaws” attacked Buram town on Monday night, killing six prominent leaders of the Habbaniyah tribe.

Sudanese authorities closed two clubs of the Eritrean community in Khartoum after finding out that activities harmful to Sudan’s national security were being conducted there, a press report said on Monday. An ”informed source” said ”espionage and other activities irrelevant to the nature of the clubs were being practised”.

More than 21 people were killed and another 40 injured in renewed assaults on the town of Kulbus, in the western Sudanese province of Darfur, it was reported on Friday. Diplomats have described the fighting in the area as ”ethnic cleansing”, with possibly government-supported Arab militias engaging in a scorched-earth policy.

Swarms of grasshoppers are attacking farm-rich central Sudan, with the worst plague there in three decades also triggering an asthma epidemic that has killed five people, a newspaper said. Five people have died among 600 reported cases of asthma in Wad Medani, about 180km southeast of Khartoum.

A total of 115 people were killed when an airliner of the national flag-carrier Sudan Airways crashed in eastern Sudan early on Tuesday, state-owned Radio Omdurman reported.

Sudanese government and southern rebel officials will meet in Kenya next week to discuss three disputed areas in central Sudan, the Kenyan peace envoy to Sudan was quoted on Monday as saying.

ELEVEN people were killed and 15 others wounded when a landmine exploded under their car Thursday morning on the outskirts of Wau.

Sudan says it has extradited to Saudi Arabia an alleged al-Qaida member accused of firing a surface-to-air missile at a US aircraft.