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/ 25 December 2007
Diplomatic wrangling dashed hopes for an end to the killing and rape in Darfur this year and a new United Nations-backed peacekeeping mission scheduled to start on January 1 faces an uphill struggle. The combined effects of war and famine have killed at least 200 000 people with more than two million displaced.
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/ 10 October 2007
Sudan’s army has denied attacking the only Darfur rebel faction to sign a peace deal with Khartoum, saying tribal clashes were to blame for the fighting that killed 45 people in Muhajiriya town. The Sudan Liberation Army, led by Minni Arcua Minnawi, was the only one of three negotiating rebel factions to sign the May 2006 deal and become part of government.
Sudan’s army bombed Muhajiriya, the main Darfur town held by the only rebel faction to sign a 2006 peace deal with Khartoum, injuring at least two dozen people, the African Union force commander said on Tuesday. Martin Luther Agwai said it was not yet clear why the fighting began on Monday.
A Sudanese army air and ground assault killed at least 45 people in the Darfur town of Muhajiriya, where bodies littered the streets amid burned out buildings, rebels who control the area said on Tuesday. ”Until now the number of dead civilians are at least 40, with 80 missing and a large number of injured,” the Sudan Liberation Army said.
A Darfur town has been burned to the ground and its residents forced to flee, days after 10 African Union (AU) troops were killed there in an attack, a joint United Nations/African Union mission said on Sunday. The report confirmed rebel statements on Friday that the remote settlement of Haskanita had been all but destroyed.
Ethiopia on Thursday pledged 5 000 troops to a United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region. The 26 000-strong joint mission is to replace a hard-pressed AU force that lacks experience, equipment and cash and has been unable to stop the conflict.
Sudan’s president has promised to pay -million in compensation to the country’s war-torn Darfur region, tripling a previous pledge, former United States president Jimmy Carter said on Wednesday. Carter also publicly clashed with a Sudanese security chief who had objected to the visit to a Darfur tribal chief.
African Union (AU) peacekeepers are outgunned and outnumbered by rebels and militias in Darfur, the AU force commander Martin Luther Agwai said on Tuesday. He said this was one reason an AU base in Haskanita, south-east Darfur, was overwhelmed so quickly during a recent attack on the peacekeepers.
The African Union on Monday began probing an unprecedented attack on one of its bases in Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur that left 10 peacekeepers dead and 25 missing, vowing to punish those responsible. ”The inquiry is under way and we will make its conclusions public,” AU Mission in Sudan spokesperson Noureddine Mezni said.
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said on Monday he would pull his country’s troops out of Darfur if it was determined that African peacekeepers who were killed at the weekend were not equipped to defend themselves. Twenty African Union soldiers were killed or injured and 40 missing after an assault on the Haskanita base in Darfur on Saturday night.