Gunmen have attacked police from the African Union and United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur for the first time, injuring one officer by beating him with a rifle butt, a UN spokesperson said on Thursday. The unarmed police were stopped at gunpoint as they returned from a routine patrol.
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/ 4 February 2008
Sudan and the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force have agreed the terms under which the 26 000-strong force will deploy in western Darfur, removing a major barrier to its operations. Experts estimate about 200 000 people have died and 2,5-million been driven from their homes.
Sudan on Wednesday strongly denied that its army had opened fire on a United Nations convoy that was attacked in Darfur days after peacekeepers began their new mission to the troubled western Sudanese region. A Sudanese driver was critically injured, a fuel tanker truck destroyed and an armoured personnel carrier damaged late on Monday.
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/ 30 October 2007
Darfur rebels boycotting peace talks in Libya said on Tuesday they would meet envoys from an African Union-United Nations mediation team but specified conditions that gave little hope they would change their positions. Mediators had hoped to unite the rival rebel factions before peace talks opened in Libya on October 27.
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/ 29 October 2007
United Nations and African Union officials are to travel to Darfur this week to try to convince key rebel leaders to join peace talks aimed at resolving the crisis in the Sudanese region, the AU said on Monday. Noureddine Mezni, spokesperson for the AU, said the officials would travel to Darfur ”in the next few days”.
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/ 29 October 2007
Darfur rebels accused Sudanese government forces of attacking an area along the border with Chad in violation of a unilateral ceasefire the government declared at the opening of peace talks in Libya. Rebels from two factions, which did not attend the talks, said on Monday the government had attacked the Jabel Moun area along the Chad-Sudan border on Saturday.
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/ 28 October 2007
Negotiators working to end four years of violence in the western Sudanese region of Darfur ploughed on on Sunday despite predictions of failure by host Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi. Although the Sudanese government declared a unilateral ceasefire at the start of the meeting on Saturday, key rebel groups have boycotted the talks in the city of Sirte
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/ 27 October 2007
Delegations gathered in Libya on Saturday to launch talks to end four-and-a-half years of conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region but the absence of key rebels cast doubt on whether negotiations could produce any meaningful deal. On the eve of the African Union-United Nations-mediated talks in Sirte, two main rebel groups said they would not attend.
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.
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.
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/ 30 September 2007
Ten African Union (AU) soldiers were killed and 50 were missing after armed men launched an assault on an AU base in Darfur, the worst attack on AU troops since they deployed in Sudan’s violent west in 2004. The AU called it a ”deliberate and sustained” assault by about 30 vehicles, which overran and looted the peacekeepers’ camp on Saturday night.