Darfur: Rebel Attack Kills 10 AU Troops

From Reuters

Ten African Union 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 some 30 vehicles, which overran and looted the peacekeepers' camp on Saturday night.

Sudan's army and Darfur rebel movements initially blamed each other for the strike on the Haskanita base in southeastern Darfur. But one rebel source said the attack was carried out by breakaway rebel forces who wanted a seat at peace talks due to begin on October 27 in Libya.

"Reports (indicate) 10 killed and 50 missing in action with seven seriously injured," said AU spokesman Noureddine Mezni.

"Our camp is completely destroyed," he said, adding it was the heaviest casualties suffered since the AU mission deployed.

"There is a feeling of shock."

News of the violence drew swift and widespread condemnation.

"Not only was it a flagrant violation of the ceasefire but an unconscionable crime that breaks every convention and norm of international peacekeeping," said Rodolphe Adada, the political head of a joint U.N.-AU mission due to replace the AU forces.

Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) spokesman Ahmed Hussein said: "It is not fair that the AU should be attacked in this way."

One rebel source said the attack was by breakaway JEM rebels trying to get vehicles, weapons and power, and gain an invitation to talks. He blamed JEM's sacked Vice President Bahr Idriss Abu Garda and former military chief Abdallah Banda.

Another source said they had been working with Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) Unity in the area.

An alliance between JEM and SLA Unity faction have become the largest military threat to Khartoum in recent months.

Abu Bakr Kadu, an SLA Unity commander, denied they were responsible, but said they had been fighting with government forces in Haskanita all day on Saturday until sunset.

"Maybe the AU was caught in the middle of the bombardment during our battles with the government. The government has been moving using the AU as cover and they are still inside Haskanita near the AU base," he said.

The AU said the attack began at 1930 (1630 GMT) on Saturday, after sunset.

From AFP

At least 10 African Union troops have been killed and 50 reported missing from their base in Sudan's western Darfur region in the bloodiest attack on the peacekeeping force, the AU said on Sunday.

"At least 10 soldiers were killed, seven wounded and dozens are missing," African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) spokesman Noureddine Mezni told AFP of the attack on Saturday night on Haskanita base in southern Darfur.

An AU statement said 50 personnel were missing after a "sustained attack by a large and organised group of heavily armed men" who broke into the camp with 30 vehicles, forcing AU troops to fight "a defensive battle."

"This is the worst single incident perpetrated against AMIS since the mission began in July 2004 and the first time that an AMIS (base) has been deliberately attacked in this fashion," it said.

The AU declined to speculate on who carried out the attack or elaborate on the nationalities of those killed.

AU-UN joint envoy Rodolphe Adada said he was "profoundly shocked and appalled by the outrageous and deliberate attack" which came just weeks ahead of peace talks in Tripoli in a bid to end what Washington has called genocide in Darfur.

"It is staggering to imagine what could possibly have been the intentions of those who perpetrated this wanton and unprovoked act," Adada said.

"It is grotesque that such an act should be conceived at a time when all parties should be preparing for the upcoming peace negotiations in Libya."

The under-equipped African force of around 7,000 troops from 26 countries patrolling Darfur, a region the size of France, is due to begin being replaced later this year by a hybrid 26,000-strong AU-UN force.

Five Senegalese AU peacekeepers were killed in an attack in April.

"Such irresponsible attacks constitute a serious violation to the ceasefire agreement," the new commander of the hybrid force, General Martin Luther Agwai, said, implicitly blaming rebels.

"Rebel groups, who indulge in such random violence and bloodshed, undermine their own credibility on any negotiation table."

Agwai also said it was regrettable that the attack happened ahead of peace talks due in Tripoli on October 27 in an attempt to broaden a Darfur peace agreement signed by only one rebel faction in May 2006.

"Despite the casualties and loss of life, we will persevere in our efforts to keep the fragile peace on the ground while all eyes are set on the negotiation table to ensure the peace is a lasting and sustainable one," he said.

Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit said that Saturday's attack showed the need to deploy the hybrid force, to which Cairo has offered to contribute 2,500 troops, "as quickly as possible."

The attack came as South African Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu was due in Khartoum heading a group of statesmen known as The Elders seeking to help peace efforts in Darfur.

The delegation includes Tutu, former United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, ex-US president Jimmy Carter and former South African president Nelson Mandela's wife, Graca Machel.

Darfur: Peace Talks Face Tremendous Challenge

From Reuters

Darfur peace talks will be a "tremendous challenge" requiring all sides to make compromises to settle the conflict in Sudan's remote west, the top U.S. diplomat in Sudan said on Wednesday.

Charge D'affaires Alberto Fernandez said U.S. envoy Andrew Natsios would begin his longest visit to Sudan this week with a trip to Darfur and also to push a separate north-south peace process where rising tensions are worrying Washington.

Talks are due to start in Libya on October 27 to end the violence Washington calls genocide. International experts estimate 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million driven from their homes since mostly non-Arabs took up arms in early 2003 accusing Khartoum of neglect.

Khartoum rejects the term and blames the West for exaggerating the fighting, putting the death toll at 9,000.

Fernandez said to make the talks successful rebels had to unify and agree on a clear negotiating position and the government had to be flexible.

"It's a tremendous challenge," he told Reuters. "If one is sincere about peace in Darfur then a lot of people have to compromise."

Since a May 2006 peace deal, signed by only one of three negotiating insurgent movements, the rebels have split into more than a dozen factions.

Fernandez said the U.N. and African Union mediators needed to go into the talks with "eyes wide open" and be aware of the shortcomings of last year's deal.

"To have an agreement that is not inclusive risks a flawed and failed agreement," he said.

He said the United States was concerned by the slow progress in getting a joint U.N.-AU peacekeeping force on the ground, despite Khartoum's agreement to the 26,000-strong mission.

"The mechanics of it, the implementation and the speed of implementation -- those are all issues of concern," he said.

U.N. officials have said the AU has rejected non-African battalions for the force, preferring all African troops, a move the rebels have criticised.

The force deployment has also been slowed by a lack of commitments from western countries for technical and logistical support units.

Fernandez said Natsios will also address the north-south peace deal signed in January 2005, which he said is at a turning point.

"We are at a juncture where things could improve or they could further deteriorate," he said.

"The level of public tension has risen measurably over the past few weeks and that's a very worrying issue of great concern to us," he added.

A military standoff in South Kordofan and raids by northern police on their southern junior coalition partners' offices in Khartoum prompted South Sudan President Salva Kiir to say a return to war was possible.

Fernandez said an agreement on demarcating the borders of Abyei, a central, disputed oil-rich region, would build confidence between the two sides.

"A solution to Abyei, a compromise, would go a very long way in solving a lot of the problems," he added.

Darfur: A Skeptical Assessment of Resolution 1769

The latest from Eric Reeves

The chances for effective deployment of civilian police and well-trained military forces to Darfur continue to be compromised by excessive international accommodation of the National Islamic Front (National Congress Party) regime in Khartoum. A key actor forcing this compromised diplomatic response to massive ongoing atrocity crimes, as well as to the continuing threat of humanitarian collapse, is the African Union---and most particularly African Union Commissioner Alpha Oumar Konaré. If there is to be any chance for expeditious and meaningful deployment of the force specified by UN Security Council Resolution 1769, then there must be very near term and consequential pressure on both Khartoum and Addis Ababa. The latter serves as headquarters for the still-nascent African organization that is fast squandering its meager political and military credibility in Darfur.

Moreover, it remains the case that China has only begun to use its singularly powerful leverage with Khartoum to produce changes in the regime’s military behavior on the ground in Darfur, and to adopt a reasonable negotiating posture. This is so despite glib optimism in some reporting quarters on the “genocide Olympics” campaign, which despite significant successes in compelling China’s attention has yet to exert enough pressure to force the needed changes in diplomatic, political, and economic policies toward Sudan. Nor can this stubborn fact be changed simply with expedient assertions that somehow Beijing has been especially helpful on Darfur. Here, Ban Ki-moon, head of UN peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno, US Special Envoy for Sudan Andrew Natsios, British officials, and others are all guilty. They would encourage the international community to believe what is so far conspicuously and mainly an international public relations effort is actually a major Chinese policy change toward Sudan.

But the grim geopolitical facts cannot be so easily rhetorically airbrushed. For those not governed by expediency, it should be clear that Beijing has made no effort to moderate Khartoum’s consistently grotesque understatement and misrepresentations of the humanitarian situation in Darfur. Indeed, Beijing’s envoy for Darfur, Liu Guijin, declared at a media briefing following his May trip to Darfur that, “I didn't see a desperate scenario of people dying of hunger." Rather, Liu said, “the people in Darfur thanked him for the Chinese government's help in building dams and providing water supply equipment.” Such a brutally callous assessment of the Darfur catastrophe of course echoes Khartoum’s own perverse accounts of the humanitarian crisis: that it has been overblown by Western humanitarian organizations for funding purposes; that only 9,000 people have died in the course of four and a half years of massive genocidal violence and displacement; that rape does not exist because (according to NIF President al-Bashir) “it is not in Sudanese culture”; that Darfur advocacy efforts are a Jewish conspiracy; and that if there is any problem in Darfur, it is no more serious than normal inter-tribal fighting following a long drought.

Complementary accounts, similar to Ambassador Liu’s, have emanated regularly from the Foreign Ministry in Beijing.

Just as consequentially, Beijing continues to insulate the Khartoum regime from pressure to respond to key demands and requirements made previously by the UN Security Council. Beijing has consistently and insistently ruled out the possibility of sanctions as a coercive tool, even in the face of Khartoum’s obdurate defiance of the international community. Thus at various points over the past three-plus years, the Security Council has passed a range of resolutions (sometimes with China abstaining) only to see specific demands and requirements brazenly ignored or flouted by Khartoum. This must serve as the primary context in which to assess the chances for successful deployment of the force specified in UN Security Council Resolution 1769.

Somalia: Starvation Threatens Children

From the Los Angeles Times

Five months old and weighing less than 10 pounds, Shukri Mohammed stretched her tiny mouth to make a giant scream Tuesday when a health worker measured her limp arm for malnutrition.

But scarcely a sound escaped from the baby's throat, and she sank back exhausted into her mother's arms.

It's been a struggle since the day Shukri was born. The next morning, her mother walked three days to escape shelling in Mogadishu that had recently killed her husband. Now settled with her mother in a displacement camp in Jawhar, north of Mogadishu, Shukri is likely to die soon unless admitted to a hospital.

As world attention focuses on the Darfur region of Sudan, Somalia is quietly disintegrating into Africa's worst humanitarian emergency, experts say.

Last week, United Nations emergency coordinator John Holmes said that conditions in Somalia had eclipsed those in Darfur and Chad as the most pressing African humanitarian crisis. Malnutrition and disease are soaring here amid political insecurity and a string of natural disasters, including flooding and drought.

Jawhar had long been an island of stability and agricultural prosperity in southern Somalia. Now, the nation's breadbasket requires food assistance for the first time since a nationwide famine from 1991 to 1993. Nearly 8,700 children here are at risk of starvation, according to UNICEF.

"Around here we've never seen this," said Owliyo Moalim, 44, a mother of five, as she lined up Monday with hundreds of other women to receive a U.N. World Food Program distribution of corn, beans and oil.

Her family used to harvest crops every three months. But consecutive floods have prevented harvesting since October 2005, she said.

With many Western charities afraid to work in the dangerous country, the transitional government is struggling to cope, but lacks experience and money. Recently, aid groups complain, the government made the crisis worse by trying to tax incoming humanitarian assistance, setting up roadblocks that hindered food deliveries and even intimidating charities and the displaced by accusing them of supporting "terrorists."

About 350,000 Somalis remain refugees from fighting this year in Mogadishu between government soldiers, supported by thousands of Ethiopian troops, and an insurgency consisting of anti-government clans and Islamist fighters. About 1.5 million people require humanitarian aid, an increase of 50% in recent months.

Malnutrition rates are skyrocketing. About 17% of children in central and southern Somalia, or 83,000, are malnourished, according to UNICEF. Some 13,500 children, including Shukri, are so severely malnourished that they are at risk of starvation.

After 16 years of civil war and clan fighting, Somalis are accustomed to hardship. There hasn't been a fully functioning government here since 1991. But the displacement crisis and natural disasters are pushing the emergency to a new level.

Somalia is also paying the price of years of anarchy, some residents said.

In the village of Boodle, south of Jawhar, children escaped the heat Tuesday by splashing in a giant lake. But the newly created lake sits atop the flooded ruins of the town's crops, immersed two months ago when the banks of the Shabelle River overflowed because of years of neglect and erosion.

"We tried to maintain the banks, but it requires bulldozers and tractors," said Hamdi Musei Osman, chief of the village. "When we had a government, they would do it. But we can't do it ourselves."

More than 22 villages, with about 8,000 people, have been affected.

With food running out, many children show early signs of malnutrition, including swollen limbs and orange-tinted hair. Fifteen have been hospitalized in the last month for malnutrition, Osman said. Stagnant water is causing a surge in malaria, which has killed nine villagers in the last two months.

Government officials say they are overwhelmed. After seizing control of Mogadishu, the capital, in December from an alliance of Islamist leaders, officials have struggled to maintain control. Though regional administrations and federal ministries have been established, they lack funding, equipment and experience.

"We don't have the power and the resources to manage this kind of crisis," said Qamar Adan Ali, Somalia's health minister. "We even depend on foreign donors for our salaries."

Chad/CAR: Security Council Approves Force

From DPA

The UN Security Council authorized Tuesday the deployment of a European Union-led force to Chad and the Central African Republic in an effortsto create security and favourable humanitarian conditions in areas inhabited by refugees.

It adopted a resolution sending the 'multi-dimensional presence' of 300 police, 50 military liaison officers and a number of civilians to eastern Chad and northeastern Central African Republic, tasked with working with the Chadian and Sudanese governments, UN refugee and relief agencies and the African Union to implement its mandate.

The EU force will be deployed in parallel with the deployment of the 26,000-strong hybrid peacekeeping in Darfur, where an ethnic war since 2003 has killed more than 300,000 people. The hybrid of UN and AU military and civilian personnel will monitor the peace agreement in Darfur.

The EU force, known as UN mission in the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT) will contribute to the protection of refugees, displaced people and the return of refugees to their countries of origin. Other tasks include assistance in reconstruction and economic and social development.

Darfur: UN Refugee Agency Threatens Cutbacks as Money Runs Out

From DPA

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) warned Tuesday it would have to scale down its operations in Sudan's western Darfur region because of a funding shortfall.

A UNHCR spokeswoman Jennifer Pagonis said there would be cutbacks in providing protection, humanitarian aid, education and health care in the conflict-torn area as of next month because just 7.1 million of the 19.7 million dollars for which the agency had appealed had been raised.

'We are seriously short of money and we are seriously concerned that that the funding lack will soon have a direct impact on our operations to assist some of the 2 million internally displaced people in Darfur.'

According to the UNHCR, 250,000 Darfuris had been newly displaced this year alone. There had been no major improvement in the security situation in Darfur and new displacement was still being reported. Most of the camps around El Geneina and Zalingei in West Darfur had reached maximum capacity and there would soon be a need to create new sites.

The situation remained highly volatile and operations difficult. So far this year 77 aid workers had been abducted and almost 70 humanitarian vehicles hijacked.

Darfur: Rebel Leader Says No Truce for Talks

From Reuters

Darfur rebel leader Khalil Ibrahim said on Tuesday he would carry on fighting during upcoming peace talks until a final settlement is reached to end the conflict in western Sudan.

Ibrahim, head of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), also said he was dismissing his deputy, Bahr Idriss Abu Garda, accusing him of secret meetings with the government to undermine the movement.

"We will not cease fire before we reach a political settlement," Ibrahim told Reuters from Darfur. "Ceasing fire is a termination of the resistance and revolution."

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said during a visit this month to Italy that he would observe a ceasefire in Darfur when talks with rebels, scheduled for October 27 in Libya, begin.

Ibrahim, whose group has been the mainstay behind fighting with the government in the far east of Darfur in recent months, said JEM would attend the talks but it would not lay down arms.

"There is no goodwill from the other side. This is only a trick," he said, adding the three rebel movements that negotiated in previous talks until May 2006 had abided by an earlier truce, which the government violated.

Only one faction signed the 2006 peace deal which has been rejected by many in Darfur as inadequate.

Since then the rebels have split into more than a dozen rival groups. But a recent military alliance between JEM and Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) Unity faction has made them the biggest military threat to Khartoum in Darfur.

And in a sign of further rebel splits, Ibrahim said Abu Garda, a veteran of the conflict, was sacked and the movement would reshuffle its executive to strengthen ranks before talks.

"He (Abu Garda) is working together with the government," Ibrahim said.

Rebels have often accused Khartoum of trying to divide them and mediators have described government attempts to negotiate deals with individual commanders as "unhelpful" as rebels worked to reach a common platform ahead of peace talks.

SLA founder and chairman Abdel Wahed Mohamed el-Nur has said he will not attend peace talks until there is security on the ground. He has few troops in Darfur but commands massive popular support, especially among Darfur's largest Fur tribe.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte last week threatened sanctions for those who did not attend October talks.

Ibrahim, who himself has been sanctioned by Washington, dismissed the threat.

"The United States doesn't have carrots for us -- only sticks," he said. "They should know by now that when they threaten they only complicate the situation.

"They should stop the threats. It will not help the peace."

Mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing central government of neglecting the remote west. Khartoum mobilized militias to quell the revolt.

International experts estimate some 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million driven from their homes during 4-1/2 years of fighting in Darfur. Washington calls the violence genocide.

Khartoum rejects the term and says the West has exaggerated the conflict, putting the death toll at 9,000.

The factionalized rebels and tribal militia infighting has caused security chaos in Darfur where the world's largest aid operation helps more than 4 million people.

In Zalengei in West Darfur, three Norwegian Church Aid workers were kidnapped on Sunday by Arab nomads who demanded blood money for three of their tribesmen killed inside the town.

One NCA official in Zalengei told Reuters the three Sudanese workers had been released into police custody for their own safety until it was safe for them to leave town on Wednesday.

"One man was injured on his hand but the other two are fine," he said, declining to be named.

He said overnight shots were fired at the U.N. security office in Zalengei and aid agencies were discussing whether it was safe to continue working in the town.

On Monday British aid agency Oxfam warned it may consider withdrawing from Darfur if the security situation worsened.

Darfur: Egypt to Send 2,100 Peacekeepers

From Reuters

Egypt will send more than 2,100 personnel to join a United Nations peacekeeping force in the Darfur region of Sudan, a newspaper reported on Tuesday.

The Egyptian soldiers would be part of a 26,000-strong joint U.N. and African Union force due to be deployed in Darfur to end more than four and a half years of conflict there.

"Egypt offered to provide the force with more than 2,100 soldiers, policemen, and observers, a step that reflects President (Hosni) Mubarak's interest in maintaining stability in this Sudanese province," said Maged Abdel Fattah, Egypt's delegate to the United Nations, quoted by the Daily News.

Egyptian government spokesman were not immediately available to comment on the report.

Sudan says the joint force should be mostly African and has turned down infantry from Thailand and Uruguay, U.N. officials say. But Khartoum has promised to allow non-African units for specialised tasks.

Egypt has contributed to a smaller African Union force which has been in Darfur for years but has failed to quell the violence.

International experts say about 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes since 2003.

Sudan puts the death toll from violence at 9,000 and accuses Western media of exaggerating the conflict, which began when mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms complaining of neglect.

Egypt, which borders Sudan and has opposed sanctions against Khartoum, has blamed recent violence in Darfur on rebel groups that rejected a May 2006 peace deal.

The timing of the full deployment of the force is still undetermined, with some predicting early next year but others expecting delays, particularly if Western nations do not offer specialised helicopter and transport units.

Darfur/Chad Conflict Spills Across Border

I have to say that I am getting really tired of these sorts of articles - this is not a new development, it has been happening for years.

From The Christian Science Monitor

They came from the east without warning, spraying bullets into huts and burning and pillaging everything in sight.

But this attack – and hundreds like it – happened here in Chad, across Sudan's western border, last fall. And the victims weren't black tribes. They were Arabs.

"Blacks have heard about their brothers in Sudan being killed by janjaweed so they are angry and attacked us Arabs here," says a Chad village chief Asair Salman, who says he saw his grandson and nephew die in the attack last November.

The violence spawned in Darfur has spread deeper into Chad and the Central African Republic. That's why the UN Security Council in New York is expected to vote Tuesday to send a new UN-European force of up to 4,000 peacekeepers here for one year. Many in Chad are concerned that with the end of the rainy season, making roads passable again, fresh fighting could erupt.

When Chad's Arabs launched reprisal attacks against black militias last fall, with the help of janjaweed from Sudan, they killed thousands of people, according to UN officials, and caused more than 170,000 Chadians to flee to camps here in eastern Chad. Nearby are other camps, already brimming with more than 300,000 Sudanese refugees.

"Interethnic clashes were the main reason Chadians were displaced, and the day [they] go back to their villages, it will be the beginning of more interethnic conflict" says Musonda Shinkindi, head of the UN refugee mission here where most Chadian refugee camps are based. "Everyone sees the dry season as a sign [of the potential for more violence], because people can move around freely," he says. But he doesn't expect most refugees to risk going back to their villages until there is more security on the ground.

EU-UN troops, led by France, could be in Chad and the Central African Republic as soon as next month. A draft of the UN mandate submitted by France calls for UN troops to work alongside Chadian police and security forces. But many question whether that's enough manpower to quell any violence that breaks out.

"Four thousand troops is not sufficient, because we have a very long border," says Abdullaye Ahmadaye Bakhit, the representative to the traditional head of all the black tribes in Darsilla, the province hit hardest by the clashes. "The janjaweed launch cross-border raids with 6,000 to 7,000 [men] at a time."

Others question whether the international troops will be enough help.

"Any international force must be able to act, not just watch, like [they do] in Darfur," says Mohammed Ali, the secretary general of Darsilla, in reference to the outmanned 7,000 African Union troops in Darfur, which are not allowed to engage warring factions in combat. In July, the UN approved sending a force of 26,000 peacekeepers to Darfur, but they are not expected until next year.

The French draft says that UN blue helmets in Chad would be "authorized to take all necessary measures" to protect civilians, refugees, and humanitarian relief workers and convoys.

Darfur: Serious Abuse Continuing Say UN Rights Experts

From AFP

A group of UN experts monitoring Darfur said Monday that serious human rights violations appeared to be continuing in the strife-torn western Sudanese region.

In a report to the UN's Human Rights Council, the experts said the Sudanese government was implementing some of their recommendations to prevent violations in the region, although progress on the ground so far appeared to be limited.

"The group of experts reiterates its concern about reports of ongoing serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights by various parties to the conflict," the report said.

It called on Khartoum to address the issue of impunity and ensure that all perpetrators of abuses are brought to justice. The experts did not list the reported incidents.

UN human rights chief Louise Arbour issued a similar warning last week, saying that human rights violations in Darfur were still "of the same nature and largely on the same scale."

She also said there was little indication that the Sudanese government was willing to respond to arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court.

UN envoy Walter Kaelin, a member of the group, on Monday praised Khartoum's "excellent cooperation" and its efforts to implement measures to stop abuse in Darfur.

But he told the 47-nation Council: "The group reiterates that the ultimate measure of the government's implementation of the recommendations compiled by the group has to be concrete improvement in the human rights situation on the ground in Darfur."

"It is possible to note at this time that while certain recommendations have been at least partially implemented, it is not in a position to report that a clear impact on the ground has been identified yet," he added.

Kaelin said the experts wanted to give Khartoum "the maximum possible time" to fulfill its undertakings and promised a comprehensive evaluation in December.

Sudan's delegation at the Council described the report as "very constructive."

In June the experts laid out more than 30 detailed "recommendations" or targets that Sudan should meet -- including clear orders to stop attacks on civilians, disarming militia and full cooperation with the ICC.

They also included indicators -- such as the numbers of attacks in Darfur or the number of people handed over to the ICC -- that would allow an assessment of progress.

The report acknowledged that the multiplication of the number of warring parties was hampering efforts on the ground, but it cautioned that they "cannot be invoked as obstacles" in stopping violations.

Darfur: Attacks Threaten Oxfam's Operation

From Reuters

Oxfam could withdraw from Darfur if security worsens, its country director said on Monday, amid reports of 10 attacks in the past four days in Sudan's violent and remote west.

Despite a peace deal signed last year by the government and one rebel faction and intense global focus on ending the conflict, Darfur has descended into chaos forcing the world's largest aid operation to evacuate some areas and work at high risk in others to provide assistance to some 4 million people.

"It's certainly a strong possibility that if things get any worse Oxfam would have to withdraw," the British aid agency's country director Caroline Nursey told Reuters.

"Oxfam is operating at the limits of what it can tolerate as an organisation. In most circumstances if the security situation were as bad as it is in Darfur we would withdraw.

"The only reason we are still there is that we are aware of very large numbers of people who are totally dependent on us for services," said Nursey, who has worked on Sudan for four years -- the last 18 months based in Khartoum.

Oxfam provides water and sanitation to 500,000 people in Darfur and neighbouring Chad, where the conflict that began in Darfur in early 2003 has spilled across the border.

Two weeks ago an Oxfam vehicle was taken in broad daylight by armed men in South Darfur's massive and volatile Kalma camp. Nursey said the driver overheard the men debating whether to kill the two Oxfam staff members.

Last year an Oxfam driver was killed in North Darfur and staff faced mock executions in an attack in South Darfur.

Since the conflict began with a revolt by mostly non-Arabs accusing the government in Khartoum of neglect, some 200,000 people have died in Darfur and 2.5 million have fled their homes for sprawling camps run by aid groups.

Around 7,000 African Union police and troops have failed to stem the violence, and the AU has been accused of bias for mediating a 2006 deal which many in Darfur's makeshift camps reject as inadequate.

Since then, rebels have split into more than a dozen rival groups and mostly Arab militias have begun fighting each other or the government which had mobilised them to quell the revolt, creating a chaotic security scenario.

Rebels, government-backed militias and bandits have all been blamed for recent attacks. Some violence has also been tribal.

Between Sept. 19-22, a U.N. statement reported eight attacks on aid convoys, compounds and police by unknown armed men in Darfur, an arid area the size of France.

On Monday a government official in West Darfur told Reuters Nertiti, in the central Jabel Marra area, was attacked two days ago. One civilian was killed and four injured. On Sunday four policemen were injured in an attack in nearby Suloo.

After months of negotiations and threats, Khartoum accepted a 26,000-strong joint U.N.-African Union force to absorb the struggling AU mission and try to quell the violence.

But a deadline for a troop commitment has had to be extended in part because western nations have not come up with the logistical and technical support needed to launch the mission.

Disputes have also arisen about the make-up of the force. U.N. officials in New York have said Khartoum and the AU have rejected non-African infantry battalions. Rebels say they prefer non-Africans because the AU has not controlled the crisis.

On Monday French daily Le Monde said France would this week present a U.N. resolution to authorise up to 4,000 European soldiers and police to deploy to neighbouring Chad and Central African Republic, both of which have suffered as Darfur's conflict bled across the border.

The report said half the 3,000 soldiers needed would be French, but the command would not be. The force headquarters would be in Paris, working under a U.N. Chapter VII mandate.

The mission would support the joint U.N.-AU force in Darfur.

Darfur: Gunmen Shoot, Wound Aid Workers

From Reuters

Gunmen shot and seriously wounded three aid workers in an attack on a humanitarian convoy in the Darfur region of western Sudan, the U.N. said in a statement.

The United Nations said the two vehicles with eight people on board working for World Vision International (WVI), a non-governmental organization, was ambushed on Thursday near Bulbul Timisgo, a small village in South Darfur State.

"Two WVI staff were shot in the head, and a third in the arm. The remaining staff suffered minor injuries caused by glass fragments and shrapnel," the statement seen by Reuters on Saturday added. "The vehicles were clearly marked as humanitarian transport."

"This is a horrifying and brutal attack on aid staff who are working to save the lives of Sudanese people," the statement said, quoting John Holmes, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.

The United Nations did not say who it believed was behind the attack. But it said the same has seen banditry and clashes between rival Arab tribes during 2007.

The United Nations said attacks on relief workers in Darfur increased 50 percent between June 2006 and June 2007.

Since the beginning of the year 98 vehicles belonging to humanitarian staff have been hijacked, 105 staff temporarily taken hostage, more than 66 humanitarian personnel physically or sexually assaulted and 61 convoys ambushed and looted, it said.

Violence has increased in Darfur since 2006, when only one of three negotiating rebel factions signed a peace deal that was rejected by the majority of Darfuris.

Chad/CAR: France to Present Troop Resolution

From Reuters

France is to present a U.N. resolution this week proposing a year-long deployment of up to 4,000 European police and soldiers to regions bordering Darfur, French daily Le Monde said on Monday.

The report said Paris would supply about half the 3,000 soldiers needed for the mission.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, who will be in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, hopes the resolution on the force in Chad and the Central African Republic would be adopted as early as Tuesday, Le Monde said.

Since the conflict in Darfur began in 2003 some 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have fled their homes for sprawling camps in Sudan and neighbouring Chad.

The Darfur spillover has worsened existing humanitarian problems in both Chad and the Central African Republic.

Those countries have indigenous conflicts, with rebels fighting the governments and bandits roaming their vast unprotected areas preying on vulnerable civilians.

Le Monde said the "multidimensional presence" in neighbouring Chad and Central African Republic was aimed at helping refugees return, protecting civilians in danger, and facilitating humanitarian aid and reconstruction efforts.

One part of the mission would focus on police operations, with 300 U.N. police officers supporting some 850 police officials from Chad at refugee camps.

The other part, made up of some 3,000 soldiers, would be military and conducted under the aegis of the European Union, with a mission to make volatile regions in eastern Chad and northeastern CAR secure, it said.

"Paris only wants French troops to make up half of the some 3,000 soldiers who will join eastern Chad from the beginning of November," Le Monde said.

The headquarters of the European force would be in Paris, operating under a U.N. mandate, but its command would not be French, the newspaper said, adding talks were under way to convince Sweden to take the command.

Around 7,000 African Union police and troops have failed to stem the violence in Darfur. After months of negotiations and threats, Khartoum accepted a 26,000-strong joint U.N.-African Union force to absorb the struggling AU mission.

The European force in Chad and CAR would support the Darfur peacemaking force, Le Monde said.

Darfur: Talks End in Disagreement

From AngolaPress

The UN and Sudan have deadlocked on whether there are enough qualified African troops to deploy as peace keepers in the troubled Darfur region.

Negotiations over the 26,000 UN-AU hybrid force, due to be deployed next year, ended in disagreement Friday, following a four-hour closed door meeting co-chaired by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and African Union (AU) Commission Chairperson Alpha Oumar Konare.

The Sudanese government had agreed to accept the peacekeeping force, provided it`s troops are predominantly African.

Sudan`s Foreign Minister, Lam Akol, told UN reporters after the meeting there were enough African troops to do the job, but UN officials disagreed, saying there was need for more technical support troops.

The UN-AU meeting also focused on the 27 Oct. peace talks in Libya between rival rebel groups that have kept Darfur in turmoil for more than four years.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said there could be sanctions against rebel leaders who failed to attend the meeting.

He, however, did not elaborate on the sanctions.

Participants at the meeting included the Foreign Ministers of Sudan, Congo, Egypt, Gabon, France, Ghana and Rwanda. Others were officials from the US, UK, EU and Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa The timing of full deployment is still up in the air, with some predicting early next year.

Delays in deployment are expected, particularly if specialised helicopter and transport units are not offered by Western nations.

Darfur: UN Kicks Off High-Level Meeting on Peace

From AFP

The United Nations and the African Union kicked off a one-day ministerial meeting here Friday to breathe new life into their joint bid to end civil strife in Sudan's western Darfur region.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon and Alpha Oumar Konare, the head of the AU Commission, are co-chairing the meeting, which got under way shortly after 3:00 pm (1900 GMT), with ministers or senior officials of nearly 30 countries or regional bodies taking part.

Participants include the foreign ministers of Sudan, Congo, Egypt, Gabon, France, Ghana and Rwanda as well as US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, British minister of state for Africa Lord Malloch-Brown, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa.

The meeting's main aim is to provide political leadership to ensure the success of crunch talks in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, on October 27 between the Sudanese government and all Darfur rebels.

The Tripoli meeting will focus on broadening the Darfur peace agreement signed in May 2006 to include those rebel groups which did not sign it.

Friday's talks here also aim to speed up preparations for the deployment of a 26,000-strong joint AU-UN force to take over peacekeeping from nearly 6,000 under-equipped and underfunded AU troops.

Darfur: Rebel Groups Suspend Poorly Attended Talks

From Reuters

Rebel groups from Sudan's violent Darfur region on Friday suspended a meeting to forge a common position for peace talks with the government, hoping more rebels would join in the consultations, a mediator said.

Darfur rebel representatives are due to meet Sudanese government officials for peace talks in Libya on October 27.

This week's meeting in neighboring Chad, which began on Wednesday, was designed to agree a rebel negotiating position, but not all the rebel groups showed up.

"The conclusion we came to, at the request of the (rebel) movements, was to hold another meeting at the start of October to allow wider consultations," Boubou Niang, a mediator for the African Union, told Reuters in Chad's capital N'Djamena.

"The movements asked us to suspend the meeting and propose another which would allow more people to be represented," he said.

Chadian officials have said five rebel groups from Darfur attended the meeting, including the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM).

But key rebel leader Abdel Wahid el-Nur, a founder of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) whose backing is seen as key to any Darfur peace deal, was absent.

Nur has refused to take part in the peace talks in Libya demanding that international troops first guarantee security by disarming pro-government militias who are accused of raiding villages and committing multiple human rights abuses in Darfur.

A four-year rebellion and recurring ethnic violence have killed some 200,000 people and driven 2.5 million from their homes since rebels mainly from African tribes took up arms against the Khartoum government and its allied Arab militia, international experts say.

Khartoum says just 9,000 people have been killed.

Differences between the fractious rebel groups have stymied previous attempts to end bloodshed in Darfur, and the African Union and United Nations organized a meeting of rebel groups last month in Arusha, Tanzania, to start discussions.

"The consultations that began in Arusha continued here in N'Djamena and will resume at the beginning of October so the movements can achieve a common position, a common delegation, to represent the interests of Darfur at the coming negotiations in Libya," Niang said.

Time To Confront Darfur

An op-ed by Adam LeBor, author of "Complicity With Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide," in The New York Sun

The United Nations 62nd General Assembly opens today and the genocide continues in Darfur. Sudan's Islamist regime has caused the death of more than 400,000 people and displaced 2.5 million, yet Sudan remains a member of the United Nations in good standing. It's darkly ironic that the United Nations was founded in 1945 in the aftermath of the Holocaust, "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." But nowadays the United Nations has strayed so far from its founding ideals that even Nazis get their moment of glory. Loyal servant of Hitler, and U.N. secretary-general from 1972-82, Kurt Waldheim, died on June 14 and they still miss him. The next day the General Assembly held a moment of silence in his memory. The secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, praised Waldheim "as a man who had lived history," who led the organization with "prudence, perseverance and precision."

The president of the United Nations's 62nd General Assembly, Srgjan Kerim, is from Macedonia. He knows that in the Balkans they remember Waldheim differently. During World War II Waldheim worked with army units that murdered Allied prisoners of war, partisans, and Serbs and that sent the Jews of Salonika to Auschwitz. Waldheim was listed as a suspected war criminal by the United Nations's own War Crimes Commission. As secretary-general Waldheim was a lackluster sycophant. Still, that's hardly the exception over at Turtle Bay. Like his predecessors, Mr. Ki-Moon is obsessed with neutrality, impartiality, and the equal treatment of all U.N. states, even if they commit genocide. He prefers refuge in a make-believe world where things are always improving even as they get steadily worse. In this Mr. Ki-Moon is at least consistent, for the pattern of the United Nations's failure in Darfur was set in Rwanda and Bosnia.

In January 1994, as the Hutu militias prepared to slaughter the Tutsis, General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, the U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda, asked U.N. headquarters for permission to raid the Hutu arms caches. Kofi Annan, then head of peacekeeping, refused. Mr. Annan's office replied, in a cable signed by his deputy, Iqbal Riza: "The overriding consideration is the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated repercussions." Soon after, the Security Council reduced General Dallaire's troops to 250 from 2,500. Over the next few months Hutu extremists slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The appeasement continued in Bosnia. In May 1995 the top U.N. official in former Yugoslavia, Yasushi Akashi, refused permission for an airstrike against the Bosnian Serbs because he said it might "weaken" President Milosevic, who he believed was needed for a peace deal. In July 1995 the Bosnian Serbs attacked a U.N.-declared "safe area," Srebrenica. There were empty desks at U.N. headquarters as General Mladic's forces advanced. Mr. Annan was away. So was Boutros-Boutros Ghali, then secretary general; the head of the Yugoslavia department, Shashi Tharoor, and the British commander of U.N. forces, General Rupert Smith, were on leave. Several days into the attack, Messrs. Boutros-Ghali, Annan, Smith, and other senior U.N. officials met in Geneva. They barely discussed Srebrenica. Incredibly, they sent Mr. Smith back on leave. Dutch peacekeepers at Srebrenica handed over up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys to the Bosnian Serbs, who then slaughtered them. Haunted by Rwanda, Mr. Annan eventually built up some momentum to confront Sudan over Darfur. He called for perpetrators of war crimes to be held accountable. He berated U.N. member states for failing to stop or halt genocide. All member states signed up for the doctrine of "Responsibility to Protect," civilians in danger. Certainly, much of the blame for not stopping carnage in Darfur lies with the five members of the U.N. Security Council: America, Britain, France, Russia, and, most of all, China, which buys Sudanese oil. But the Secretary General and his officials still have powerful moral authority to shape policy. It seems that like Yasushi Akashi, Mr. Ki-Moon will go to absurd and bizarre lengths to avoid confronting the perpetrators of genocide. The problem in Darfur, he now argues, is rooted in ecological problems. Writing in the Washington Post, the day after he eulogised Mr. Waldheim, Mr. Ki-Moon said: "Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change." They doubtless agree in Khartoum. The crisis in Darfur may be exacerbated by climate change. But its primary cause is simple: The Islamist regime in Khartoum has, since spring 2003, waged a campaign of genocide. The United Nations's own 176-page report on Darfur, published in early 2005, established that Sudan and the Janjawid are responsible for "serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law."

Security Council Resolution 1769, passed in July, has been hailed as a great step forward. It authorizes 26,000 U.N. police and peacekeepers, with a mandate to protect civilians and aid workers. But as usual with the United Nations, the devil is in the details. As Darfur activist Eric Reeves shows, 1769 has no mandate to seize weapons or halt air attacks on civilians. It introduces a hybrid joint African Union-United Nations command structure that will inevitably lead to confusion. Sudan's insistence that most troops be African will also cause further delay. So today, as every day, Mr. Ki-Moon and the United Nations dither and the carnage in Darfur continues. But perhaps we should no longer be surprised that the United Nations is unable to confront those involved in genocide. It seems it prefers to honor them.

Darfur: UN, AU Differ on Composition of Peace Force

From Reuters

Not enough countries have contributed to the peacekeeping force in Darfur and the African Union is blocking some of those who have, diplomats said on the eve of a high-level meeting on Sudan on Friday.

Ministers or their deputies from 26 countries have been invited to the late Friday session, chaired by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and African Union Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare to analyze U.N.-A.U. plans for a joint force in Darfur, energize peace talks and expand aid to more than 2 million people expelled from their homes.

Jean-Marie Guehenno, the U.N. undersecretary-general for peacekeeping, said earlier this week the force still needs specialized helicopter, transport and logistical units.

While African nations have offered enough infantry troops for the force of up to 26,000 troops and police, some of them are without proper equipment.

Consequently U.N. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that soldiers would have to be found from other nations. But Konare had raised objections to some units, including those offered by Norway, Uruguay and Thailand.

Touching on the conflict, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters, "We understand that the character of the force has to be African but (it's) a UN-AU force," with U.N. member states footing the bill.

"It has been understood from the beginning that there will be complementary non-African forces and capabilities available to complement the predominantly African character" of the force," Khalilzad said.

"But I think right now the African Union secretariat needs to move," he added.

The agenda also includes a report from U.N. and A.U, mediators of peace talks between the Sudan government and rebel groups, scheduled for Libya on Oct. 27 in hopes of a cease-fire before the planned force is fully deployed.

The peace conference would seek to end a conflict that has generated one of the world's worst humanitarian crises and sparked U.S. accusations -- dismissed by Sudan -- of genocide. Much of the killing, rape and looting has been blamed on a government-allied militia known as the Janjaweed.

International experts estimate some 200,000 people have died and over 2.5 million have been made homeless in Darfur since an uprising against alleged government neglect of the region flared in 2003. Khartoum puts the death toll at 9,000.

But one item not on the agenda is how to get Sudan to turn over two men charged by the International Court with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Khartoum has refused to do so.

"I am concerned that the silence by most states and international organizations on the subject of the arrest warrants has been understood in Khartoum as a weakening of international resolve," Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the court's prosecutor told a news conference on Thursday.

"Justice in Darfur must be on the agenda, at the top of the agenda," he said, adding that one of those charged, Ahmad Harun, was now senior official for humanitarian affairs.

"As peace talks and negotiations for the deployment of the hybrid force advance, there is a resurgence of violence around the camp," Moreno-Ocampo said. "I have reasons to believe that it is an operation in which Ahmad Harun plays a key role."

Darfur: Sudan Press Blames Rebels for Bombing

From AFP

Sudanese newspapers blamed supporters of hardline Darfur rebel chief Abdel Wahid Mohammed Nur on Friday for a Khartoum bombing which police said wounded six people and could have caused heavy casualties.

Police said that demonstrators threw a bomb at a petrol tanker as it was unloading at a fuel station in the densely populated heart of the capital on Thursday.

"Police successfully foiled the attack and arrested some of the protestors who numbered around 20 in all," underlining that "a potential catastrophe was averted."

Police did not specify who carried out the bombing but independent daily Sudani cited witnesses as saying the demonstrators carried pictures of Nur, who is refusing to join other Darfur rebel leaders in next month's renewed peace talks in Libya with the Khartoum government.

Nur's faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement is demanding full deployment of the new joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur before it will take part in fresh negotiations with Khartoum.

Al-Watani newspaper raised the spectre of the more than four-year-old conflict in Darfur spilling over into the Sudanese capital.

Darfur: Sudan Holds Rebel Supporters After Protest

From Reuters

Sudanese authorities have detained several supporters of a Darfur rebel leader after clashes with police in Khartoum, the interior ministry said.

Supporters of Abdel Wahed el-Nur, the founder of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), took to the streets on Thursday to back his conditional refusal to attend peace talks scheduled with the government next month.

"The police foiled an attempt to create disorder and arrested some of them (the protesters)," Khartoum State Deputy Police Commissioner Mohammed Nejuib al-Tayeb said in a statement seen by Reuters on Friday.

He said a group of about 20 protesters had tried to set fire to a fuel tanker that was offloading at a nearby gas station.

"Six people sustained various injuries in the incident," he said without elaboration.

One of the protesters, Mohammed Babikir, told Reuters the demonstration was peaceful and aimed at supporting Nur's conditions for attending next month's peace talks in Libya to end the 4-1/2-year conflict in Darfur.

Nur has said he will refuse to attend peace talks before the deployment of 26,000 U.N. and African Union peacekeepers, the disarmament of government-backed militias and guarantees of security across the region.

Darfur: Speak Up on Suspects, ICC Prosecutor Says

From Reuters

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on Thursday challenged the United Nations and its members to break their silence on two men he charged with war crimes in Darfur.

A day before Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presides over a meeting of 26 nations involved in bringing peace to Darfur, Luis Moreno-Ocampo said too little attention had been paid to his arrest warrants, an issue not on the agenda of the talks.

He charged a Sudanese official and a pro-government militia leader, but Sudan refuses to arrest them.

"I am concerned that the silence by most states and international organizations on the subject of the arrest warrants has been understood in Khartoum as a weakening of international resolve," Moreno-Ocampo told a news conference.

"It is time to break the silence," he said.

Sudan reacted sharply to his comments, accusing the prosecutor of deliberately sabotaging the peace process.

Ban, who needs Khartoum's cooperation to get a peacekeeping force into Darfur and start cease-fire talks, said he had spoken to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir about the suspects during his recent trip to Khartoum.

But he would would not disclose what was discussed and U.N. sources said he did not brief Moreno-Ocampo afterwards.

The Hague-based ICC in May charged Ahmad Harun with organizing a system to fund and arm militias against rebels attacking the Sudanese army. The militias then wiped out villages and are now fighting each other over the spoils. Harun is currently the minister of state for humanitarian affairs.

The court also issued an arrest warrant for pro-government militia leader Ali Mohammed Ali Abdalrahman, also known as Ali Kushayb, who like Harun was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Some 200,000 people are estimated to have died and more than 2 million driven into squalid camps since the conflict broke out four years ago.

Sudan has said the charges against Harun were false. But Moreno-Ocampo said Harun was responsible for forcing millions out of their homes and now is controlling security and access to food in the camps.

"Justice in Darfur must be on the agenda, at the top of the agenda," the prosecutor said because there could be "no political solution, no security solution, no humanitarian solution as long as Ahmad Harun remains free in the Sudan."

"As peace talks and negotiations for the deployment of the hybrid force advance, there is a resurgence of violence around the camp," Moreno-Ocampo said. "I have reasons to believe that it is an operation in which Ahmad Harun plays a key role."

But Sudan's U.N. Ambassador, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem, characterized Moreno-Ocampo as a man with a mission "to destroy the peace process," especially talks between rebels and the government scheduled for Oct. 27 in Tripoli, Libya.

"Rather than mobilizing all resources and energies to ensure the success of that meeting, he came now to New York to play the same political game assigned to him by the enemies of peace in the Sudan, which is to destabilize the country and to spoil the peace process," the ambassador said.

Abdalhaleem said nations should stop him because Moreno-Ocampo was trying to influence Friday's Darfur meeting.

"Mr. Ocampo is a member of the orchestra that is playing a melody that would definitely entertain some people here in this organization, but the casualty would be peace, stability and security of the country," he said.

The ICC is the first permanent global criminal tribunal to try individuals for world's most heinous crimes that national government would not or could not prosecute. It began functioning four years ago and has moved slowly, with seven arrest warrants issued: four for Uganda's notorious Lord's Resistance Army, one Congolese and the two Sudanese.

Darfur: Zawahri Urges Attacks on Peacekeepers

From Reuters

Al Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri urged Sudanese Muslims in a video posted on Thursday to fight a force of African Union and U.N. peacekeepers set to deploy to Sudan's volatile western region of Darfur.

In an 80-minute compilation video that touched on a several conflicts, Zawahri criticized Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's decision to accept a U.N. resolution that lays the ground for a 26,000-strong joint AU-U.N. operation.

"Bashir announced before that he would oppose the deployment of international troops to Darfur ... but this was a lie ... and he backtracked step by step until he had agreed to everything they imposed on him," Zawahri said in the tape.

Zawahri accused Bashir of abandoning his Muslim brothers to appease the United States and said he did not deserve the protection of Muslims.

"Therefore, I address the nation of Muslim mujahideen in Sudan and remind it that today's is a great test and the free mujahideen sons of Sudan must organize jihad against the forces invading Darfur as their brothers organized the jihadi resistance in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia," Zawahri said.

Darfur: The Limits of Diplomacy

From the Los Angeles Times

Here on the territorial edge of one of the world's most intractable crises, U.N. peacemaker Jan Eliasson looks a gray-bearded tribal leader in the eye and tells him that there are moments in history that can make the difference between peace and more war.

Talks are taking place aimed at solving the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, and the elder, called the makhtoum of Nyala, needs to persuade a rebel leader from his tribe to join in, Eliasson says.

"If we miss this opportunity now, your people will languish in the camps, your land will be grabbed, your problems will continue," the tall Swedish diplomat says. "Take the chance now! The whole world wants peace in Darfur!"

The makhtoum clutches his bamboo cane and lets Eliasson's plea hang in the dirt-floored room. A fly buzzes, then lands.

"We are ready to speak to our sons," he finally says.

Eliasson, a peace negotiator for 25 years, is one of the U.N.'s most experienced diplomats. Friday at the U.N., foreign ministers from 26 nations will discuss how to coordinate pressure on Sudan's government, part of his strategy to address the problem from all sides instead of from the top down. The diplomatic effort is supposed to culminate with peace talks to begin Oct. 27 in Tripoli, Libya.

But Darfur, Sudan's vast, arid western region, has become a lesson in the limits of diplomacy, an example of how a single regime can defy world opinion seemingly with impunity.

Of all the world's trouble spots, few have received as much attention recently as Darfur. An estimated 200,000 civilians have died here since fighting began in 2003. President Bush and many others have labeled the killings genocide. They say Sudan's government has used militia groups, known as janjaweed, to try to wipe out tribes such as the Fur, the makhtoum's ethnic group. The tribes, in turn, have backed rebels who seek more power and wealth from Sudan's central government, based in Khartoum.

The attacks have dwindled this year, as many villagers fled to camps run by the U.N., and humanitarian efforts have greatly reduced the death toll. But the rebels and militias continue to fight, and long-term stability remains elusive. Settlers linked to the janjaweed have begun to take over the abandoned land, foreshadowing new conflict if villagers try to return home.

Eliasson has spent much of the last several months traveling with his counterpart from the African Union, Salim Ahmed Salim, in an effort to bring warring parties and the countries that support them to peace talks.

It is an effort he compares with "herding cats," and the makhtoum's agreement, he knows, is just one step.

Darfur, he says, "is one of the most difficult problems I have ever faced."

Darfur: Civilians Under Attack

From Human Rights Watch

As the United Nations and African Union prepare to deploy the world’s largest-ever peacekeeping mission to Darfur, Sudanese government forces, allied “Janjaweed” militia, rebels and former rebels have free rein to attack civilians and humanitarian workers in Darfur, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The situation in Darfur has evolved from an armed conflict between rebels and the government into a violent scramble for power and resources involving government forces, Janjaweed militia, rebels and former rebels, and bandits. But these complexities should not deflect attention from Khartoum’s responsibility for indiscriminate aerial and ground attacks, complicity in Janjaweed attacks against civilians, failure to hold rights abusers accountable, and its unwillingness to establish a policing force that can protect civilians.

“The new peacekeeping mission in Darfur will need the resources and political support to protect civilians,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Targeted sanctions should be imposed on Sudan if it obstructs peacekeepers and allows attacks on civilians.”

The 76-page report, “Darfur 2007: Chaos by Design – Peacekeeping Challenges for AMIS and UNAMID,” describes the current human rights situation in Darfur. Recent case studies from across Darfur illustrate how the proliferation of armed actors and the government’s failure to strengthen the rule of law – particularly the police – are contributing to the abuses.

After civilians are displaced from their homes, they find themselves trapped in camps for the internally displaced. If they venture outside to farm, collect firewood, or return home, they risk being beaten, raped, robbed, or murdered – usually by Janjaweed and former rebels. Outsiders who are now occupying their land block prospects for sustainable peace and their return. Inter-tribal Arab fighting has left hundreds of more people dead and thousands displaced.

The report describes the critical ways in which the new peacekeeping mission, the UN-AU Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), and the international community must provide better civilian protection and address the shortcomings that have hampered the African Union’s current mission, the AU Mission in Sudan (AMIS).

Divided in Darfur

From the Economist

More reasons to doubt the prospects for peace

The international community seems at last to be making some headway in its efforts to solve Sudan's Darfur crisis. However, achieving a peace settlement depends on the various Darfur rebel groups managing to present a united front—if anything, the divisions between them are becoming more pronounced.

The recent progress follows the approval of a resolution by the UN Security Council in June calling for the establishment of 26,000-strong peacekeeping force, to be deployed by mid-2008. The following month, most of the Darfur rebel groups agreed a common negotiating position at Arusha, in Tanzania. More recently, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, obtained the Sudanese government's agreement to attend talks with the rebels in Libya at the end of October. Finally, the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, took the opportunity of a visit to the Vatican last week to announce—just prior to a meeting with the Pope—that he would declare a ceasefire to coincide with the start of the negotiations.

Any progress is, of course, better than none. Nevertheless, these developments are less promising than they appear at first glance. The UN/African Union peacekeepers will take time to deploy, and could face serious supply constraints, with water likely to be a major problem, as well as limited co-operation from both the government and some rebel factions. Libya is an odd choice of venue for the peace talks (the Libyan leader, Colonel Qadhafi, has played a controversial role in Darfur). Some important rebel leaders—most notably Abdel Wahid al-Nur of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), one of the two main groupings—have already declared that they will not attend. But Mr Bashir's announcement applies only to those rebels who do go to Libya—and it does not cover the period before talks begin. Since the announcement of talks, government forces have already launched attacks with helicopter gunships on the town of Haskanita in North Darfur, apparently targeting the leader of the other main rebel organisation, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), Khalil Ibrahim. The attack came shortly after a visit by international mediators, and was described as "alarming" by Mr Ban.

Cleavages

Even if the rebels get to Libya, they are likely to find negotiations difficult. Following the signature of the failed Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) in May 2006 in Abuja, Nigeria, the rebels have splintered into around 12-15 nebulous factions focused around key leaders. There are splits between tribes (principally the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit, although there are also smaller tribes and sub-groups); between military leaders in the field and political figures spending most of their time in exile abroad; and between those seeking compromise and hardliners. A series of attempts by various sets of rebels to form common fronts have merely added to the confusion.

After the DPA, the SLM divided between Minni Minnawi, the Zaghawa leader who signed the deal, and Mr Nur, from the Fur tribe, who rejected it. However, both leaders have since lost military support on the ground, with the emergence of a loose and contentious alliance of field commanders, known as "SLM-Unity" or the Group of 19 (G19). The Non-Signatory Faction (NSF), a common front formed in late 2006 by most of the SLM leaders except Mr Minnawi, is effective only on paper.

The principal SLM factions are:

* Mr Minnawi, despite being named a senior assistant to the Sudanese president and head of the Darfur Transitional Authority, remains weak and isolated in the capital, Khartoum. Many of his field commanders have defected, either to the G19 or to go "freelance" as bandits.

* Mr Nur, now based in Paris, retains some support among the Fur in the refugee camps, but lacks military strength. So does Ahmed Abdel-Shafei, a former colleague who challenged Mr Nur for the SLM chairmanship in the wake of the DPA and now heads the "SLM-Classic". Of the commanders formerly loyal to Mr Nur, a few (such as Abul Gasim Imam, now governor of West Darfur) later signed up to the DPA. Most, however, are now linked to the G19.

* The leaders of the G19 with the most military strength on the ground include Abdullah Yehia and Jar el-Nabi Abdel-Karim, both Zaghawas, and Suleiman Marajan, of the Meidob tribe. Other formerly powerful leaders, such as Adam Bakheit, another Zaghawa formerly supporting Mr Minnawi, and Khamis Abdullah Abaker, the most prominent Masalit among the rebels, have been partly marginalised since fleeing to neighbouring Chad. Overall, the G19 commanders remain independent and fragmented. The group's humanitarian co-ordinator, Suleiman Jamous, recently released by the Sudanese government under strong international pressure (including an offer by Mia Farrow, a Hollywood actress who has taken a close interest in the Darfur issue, to take his place in prison), was a powerful unifying symbol when detained, but is likely to do less to bring the factions together now that he has been freed.

The JEM leader, Mr Ibrahim, is a Zaghawa, and had in the past strong links (which he now disavows) to Sudan's Islamist movements. At the time of the DPA, the JEM was a relatively minor player, but its strength grew rapidly, based on the ample financial and military resources at its disposal—partly from Chad, despite the old enmity between Mr Ibrahim and the Chadian president, Idriss Deby, who is from a rival Zaghawa grouping. This facilitated the creation of the National Redemption Front (NRF), a tactical alliance with the SLM's G19 commanders which won a series of military victories against the government in late 2006. However, squabbles over the division of spoils seem not only to have broken up the NRF, but also to have caused a number of the JEM field commanders to strike out independently. Most recently, in June 2007, Ibrahim Yehia, former president of the JEM Assembly, defected to the Sudanese government.

United only in acronyms

Aware that they are weakened by divisions, most of the rebels want further internal consultations before the Libyan peace talks. They are distrustful, however, of international efforts to force them to unify. Interested African neighbours have too often promoted new coalitions with little strength on the ground, in the hope that they will be allocated funds and government positions following peace negotiations. In mid-2007, for the Arusha talks, Eritrea supported the formation of the United Front for Liberation and Democracy (UFLD), made up largely of exiles and political figures, including:

* The Chad-based Khamis Abdullah Abaker, formerly of the SLM's G19.

* The Sudan Federal Democratic Alliance (SFDA) led by Ahmed Ibrahim Diraige, a former governor from the Fur tribe, with little support on the ground.

* A group surrounding Dr Sharif Harir, a Zaghawa academic with links to the Chadian president, who used to be Mr Diraige's deputy but now claims SLM allegiance.

* The Revolutionary Democratic Front Forces (RDFF), under Abdel-Rahman Musa, a Rizeigat Arab of the Baggara tribe, who aims to improve relations between the rebels and the Arab groups in Darfur, but has lost the support of some of his field commanders.

* The National Movement for Reform and Development (NMRD), a Chadian creation with little credibility led by Jibril Abdel-Karim, a Zaghawa formerly with the JEM.

Don't pressure us

Similarly, however, the rebels are extremely hostile to perceived pressure from the international community, which they blame for the failure of the DPA. Both long-term initiatives to promote reconciliation and the UN and AU's more recent efforts to persuade the rebels to form a common negotiating body appear to be disintegrating under pressure of the late-October deadline, with the Libyan negotiations offering potential rewards for those leaders who can accrue the most impressive-sounding titles beforehand.

Moreover, competition among the various rebel factions means that none of them will be eager to moderate the stringent common platform (including demands for greatly enhanced political representation and financial compensation from the Khartoum government) agreed on at Arusha.

The case of Mr Minnawi—who may or may not be allowed to attend the Libyan talks, and is unlikely to receive much consideration from either side at them if he does—is seen as a warning to other rebel leaders who might be tempted to agree to a less advantageous deal. They are therefore stepping up their rhetoric, with Mr Nur remaining obdurate that he will not attend the talks, and Mr Ibrahim (in the wake of the attempt to bomb his headquarters at Haskanita) saying that Darfur will seek to secede from Sudan altogether if a deal cannot be agreed. This may be playing into the hands of the Sudanese government, however, which would be quite happy for the talks to fail—as long as it escapes the blame of the international community.

Darfur: Battle Kills 45, Says Rebel Group

From Reuters

A rebel leader from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region said his fighters defeated a government battalion on Wednesday in a three-hour battle that killed 45 people.

Sudan Liberation Army faction chairman Ahmed Abdel Shafie said one of his units attacked government soldiers stationed in the village of Dobow in the central Jabel Marra region.

A Sudanese armed services spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Shafie said he had ordered the attack to clear government forces from a key access route through his territory.

"This is territory controlled by the SLA Ahmed Abdel Shafie faction. The government were trying to block the roads to this area, to stop support coming to people in this area. We had to clear the roads. Now aid agencies will be able to come and bring help to the people who need it," he said.

Shafie said 40 government soldiers and five rebels were killed in the early morning assault, adding: "The rest of the government troops fled."

The attack is the latest in a series of confrontations reported in Sudan's remote west that have cast a shadow over plans for peace talks between Sudan's government and rebel groups in October.

Representatives from five Darfuri insurgent groups, including the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), met in Chad on Wednesday to try to agree a common position ahead of the peace talks.

But one rebel leader, Abdel Wahid el-Nur, a founder of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) whose backing is seen as key to any Darfur peace deal, was absent from the meeting.

He has refused to take part in peace talks with Sudan's government scheduled to be held in Libya on October 27, saying international troops must first guarantee security by disarming militias in Darfur.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is due to chair a high level meeting in New York this week to finalise a strategy for the peace negotiations.

Shafie said he was sending a report to the New York meeting setting out his conditions for the talks. "There are many things we need to get established before the talks. The main one is security," he said.

Darfur: Rebel Leader Demands Delay in Peace Talks

From Reuters

A Darfur rebel leader called for a postponement of planned October peace talks with Sudan's government on Thursday, demanding a "few months of total calm" in the strife-torn region before negotiations start.

Ahmed Abdel Shafie, head of a breakaway faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement, became the third senior rebel leader to raise concerns over the appropriateness of U.N. and African Union-brokered talks planned for Libya on October 27.

Abdel Shafie's faction said in a statement that continued violence in Sudan's remote west meant that "the parties to the conflict in Darfur are not yet prepared to enter into genuine political negotiations".

"The timing of the forthcoming round of peace negotiations ... needs to be reconsidered," it added.

The comments came a week after the head of Darfur's Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) Khalil Ibrahim said that continued clashes with government troops might make it impossible for him to leave his fighters to attend the talks.

Abdel Wahed Mohamed el-Nur, another SLM faction leader who lives in Paris, has said he would refuse to attend any peace talks before the arrival of 26,000 U.N. and African Union peacekeepers, the disarmament of government-backed militias and guarantees of security across the region.

Five rebel groups, including JEM and SLM factions, held a second day of negotiations in the Chadian capital N'Djamena on Thursday to hammer out a common position on the peace talks.

The SLM's Abdel Shafie told Reuters he had not attended the Chad meeting because his faction wanted to concentrate on unifying its own position. Instead, he sent his demands directly to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon ahead of a conference on Darfur between the U.N. and the African Union due to take place in New York on Friday.

Abdel Shafie said he was not yet threatening to pull out of the Libya talks, and wanted to wait to see whether his demands could be met.

"We are demanding a few months of calm, but the precise period of time is up for negotiation. What we are saying is that if our demands are not met, it will be very hard for these peace talks to succeed."

Specific demands include an immediate ceasefire, confidence-building measures, and an end to what rebels say is a government policy of resettling foreigners in Darfur.

Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir last week promised to observe a ceasefire in Darfur from the start of peace talks. Reports of clashes between government troops and rebel factions have continued to emerge from Sudan's remote west in the run up to the talks.

Late on Wednesday, Abdel Shafie said his fighters had attacked a battalion of government soldiers that he said were blocking key supply routes in Darfur's central Jabel Marra region. An armed forces spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Darfur/Chad/CAR: France Calls for Protection Force

From Sapa-AFP

France on Wednesday called for a joint force of United Nations and European Union peacekeepers to protect civilians in parts of Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR) bordering Sudan's war-torn Darfur region.

It tabled a resolution at the UN Security Council for a mixed force in eastern Chad and the north-east of the CAR, where the refugee crisis caused by a brutal civil war in Darfur has spilled over.

The text approves a year-long "multidimensional presence intended to help create the security conditions conducive to a voluntary, secure and sustainable return of refugees and displaced persons".

It would consist of 300 UN police officers tasked with training 850 Chadians to police the displacement camps, and an EU military force of up to 4 000 to protect the areas -- a proposal approved in principle by the Europeans in July.

This European contingent would also back up the 26 000 troops of the joint peace force agreed by the UN and the African Union and due to be fully deployed in Darfur by mid-2008.

The French military would play a major role in the EU force for Chad and the CAR, two of France's former colonies, with the operation headquartered in Paris, according to the text of the resolution.

Chad alone harbours 236 000 refugees from Darfur and 173 000 Chadians internally displaced. The CAR has seen an influx of 10 000 refugees and more than 200 000 of its own people displaced in the north and north-east.

France's ambassador to the UN, Jean-Maurice Ripert, said he hoped the resolution would be adopted by the end of the month.

Darfur: U.N. Peacekeeping Chief Says Mission Facing Shortfalls

From the AP

The head of U.N. peacekeeping operations said in an interview published Wednesday that he fears a shortage of helicopters, trucks and other transport equipment for a new U.N. force in Darfur.

Jean-Marie Guehenno also criticized a shortage of support from Europe for a 26,000-strong force for the troubled Sudanese region, and said the U.N. will have trouble mustering the police force it wants.

"It's true that there aren't a lot of offers from Europe at the moment," Guehenno told Le Monde newspaper. "The Nordics are ready to commit, but we don't have concrete proposals for high-level engineering units — to dig wells, for example — or for transportation."

The United Nations and the African Union have led months of difficult talks with Sudan's government on deployment of the joint AU-U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur, which was finally approved July 31.

"We've received offers for most of its elements," Guehenno said. "But we'll have to see if these troops will have the needed equipment, especially for the first important waves to set up the mission without delay."

"What worries me the most is the lack of tactical transport, trucks, helicopters," Guehenno said. He also said the U.N. will have trouble meeting targets for an estimated 6,000-strong police force.

The peacekeeping chief also said that a recent upsurge in violence and splintering of rebel movements was a cause for concern, saying that raised the need for a robust force in Darfur.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir Tuesday to commit to a cease-fire in Darfur, warning that the upsurge in fighting could damage negotiations to take place in Libya next month aimed at ending the four-year conflict.

Darfur: Rebels Fine-Tune Position Ahead of Key Meeting

From AFP

Rebel groups from Sudan's volatile Darfur region gathered Wednesday in the Chadian capital Ndjamena to forge a common position ahead of next month's peace talks with the Khartoum regime.

Five rebel factions that did not sign up to a May 2006 peace agreement, inked in the Nigerian capital Abuja with the Sudanese government, were gathered for the preparatory talks, Chadian officials said.

"This meeting... aims at bringing Sudanese rebel groups which have not signed the Abuja accord to harmonise their positions and speak in a single voice at the Tripoli conference," a Chadian official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Conflict in Darfur, combined with the effects of famine, has left at least 200,000 people dead and two million displaced since Khartoum enlisted Janjaweed Arab militia allies to put down an ethnic minority rebellion in 2003.

It is hoped that the crunch talks in the Libyan capital on October 27 between all the Darfur rebel groups and the Sudanese government might help to bring a definitive end to the violence.

However, the founding father of the Darfur rebellion, Abdel Wahid Mohammed Nur, who does not recognise the legitimacy of several of the other rebel factions, shunned Wednesday's meeting.

Nur, who currently resides in Paris, had also boycotted talks in the Tanzanian city of Arusha early last month.

African Union emissary Boubou Niang urged the groups gathered in Chad "to do all that is possible to forge a common platform before you leave for Tripoli.

"The international community has placed a lot of hope in you," he said. UN chief Ban Ki-moon is gathering Friday key players in the Darfur conflict at the United Nations headquarters in New York to build up momentum for a final end to the bloodshed in the western Sudanese region.

"I hope that we will be able to map our strategy and roadmap for the forthcoming political negotiations in Libya," Ban said, adding: "We will need to redouble our efforts so as not to lose the positive momentum."

Darfur: Ban Reveals Talk With Sudan on War Crimes Suspects

From Reuters

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon disclosed on Tuesday he had raised with Sudan's president the Khartoum government's refusal to hand over two suspected Darfur war criminals to an international court.

"I raised this issue with President (Omar Hassan) Bashir more than once in a private conversation," Ban, who visited Sudan earlier this month, told a news conference.

"As my meeting was done in private conversation, I should prefer not to disclose all the details," he said. "But ... I will continue to raise and discuss this matter."

The Hague-based International Criminal Court in May charged Ahmad Harun with organizing, funding and arming militia to stop rebels from attacking the Sudanese army. The militia then wiped out villages and are now fighting each other over the spoils.

Harun is now the minister of state for humanitarian affairs, which ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo says is akin to putting the man in charge of a crisis he helped foment.

An estimated 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have lost their homes since violence broke out four years ago.

The court also issued an arrest warrant for pro-government militia leader Ali Mohammed Ali Abdalrahman, also known as Ali Kushayb, who like Harun was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But Bashir has refused to arrest them, saying the charges against Harun are false and that Sudan is not a signatory to the court.

While U.N. bodies are demanding Khartoum make the arrests, they need Bashir's agreement for a new peacekeeping force of 26,000 troops and police and Sudan's cooperation for a peace settlement in Darfur.

Recognizing the contradiction, Ban said that while justice was part of the peace process one had to keep a low profile in dealing with Khartoum.

"For a certain period, certain occasions, there are certain issues which need to be kept confidential for the purpose of promoting and making progress on those issues," Ban said.

The Darfur crisis will be discussed at one of a series of high-level meetings Ban has arranged this week before world leaders address the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. Others include weekend sessions on how the United Nations can help Iraq and Afghanistan, a Middle East mediators meeting and a climate change summit on Monday.

Ban in his comments said he also urged Bashir work towards a cease-fire in Darfur, particularly in light of a recent increase in fighting.

"For that, he must commit to this cessation of hostilities and protect all humanitarian workers and humanitarian assistance should be flowing without any hindrance and protect and respect human rights."

"These are what I have emphasized. I was very much concerned about all this recurrence of violence."

Asked whether he had contacted the Sudanese president about the attacks, which broke out after his recent visit. he said he had not "but I hope that he has heard my statement and my concern clearly."

Ban on Monday warned that the recent fighting in Sudan's Darfur region could derail peace talks among rebels and the government that he had announced would start in Libya next month.

His statement focused on incidents in Haskanita in North Darfur, on Sept. 10 and 11, when African Union peacekeepers said government aerial bombardments involving helicopter gunships and ground clashes had killed a number of civilians.

Darfur: Ban Hopes Sudan's Leader Got Message That Fighting Hurt Political Negotiations

From the AP

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Sudan's president on Tuesday to commit to a ceasefire in Darfur and heed his warning that the recent upsurge in fighting could have a negative impact on upcoming political negotiations to end the four-year conflict.

Ban, who held two rounds of talks with President Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum earlier this month, said the Sudanese government and the international community must redouble their efforts to maintain the positive momentum toward peace.

The "Sudanese government should take utmost efforts to manage this path with utmost care," Ban said. "This process has been and will be very fragile. (The) whole international community must nurture this process. For that, he must commit (to) this cessation of hostilities and protect all humanitarian workers."

During Ban's visit, he and al-Bashir announced that new negotiations between the government and rebel groups to settle the Darfur conflict will be held in Tripoli, Libya, starting Oct. 27. On Friday, Ban and African Union Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare are chairing a high-level meeting at U.N. headquarters to map out strategy and a roadmap for the negotiations.

The announcement culminated a new initiative by the two organizations to relaunch peace efforts and months of difficult negotiations with the Sudanese government on deployment of a new 26,000-strong AU-U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur, which was finally approved on July 31.

Ban told a news conference that he was "very much concerned" at the recurrence of violence in Darfur.

In a statement Monday, Ban said he was "alarmed" that the reported attacks took place after the Sudanese government said in a joint communique during his recent visit that it was committed to a ceasefire in the run-up to the new negotiations.

The government of Sudan, in the communique, pledged "to contribute positively to a secure environment for the negotiations, fulfilling its commitment to a full cessation of hostilities in Darfur, and agreed upon ceasefire."

Ban cited recent attacks, including bombings by helicopter gunships and military clashes in Hashkanita in North Darfur on Sept. 10-11 and attacks in Adilla, South Darfur, and Wad Banda in neighboring Kordofan, last month.

"The timing of the violence is particularly troubling as it could create conditions that are not conducive to the success of the upcoming political negotiations," Ban's spokeswoman Michele Montas said Monday. "The secretary-general strongly urges all parties to show restraint and cease all military action in order to create a positive atmosphere for the envisaged political negotiations."

Ban told reporters Tuesday he had not spoken to al-Bashir on the recent fighting, "but I hope that he has heard my statement and my concern clearly."

The secretary-general reiterated that the United Nations is working on three fronts — peace negotiations which are most important, promoting peace and security by deploying the hybrid force which "is going well even though there are still many pending issues," and starting development programs as progress is made toward a political solution.

"And in that, cessation of hostilities will provide very important groundwork," Ban said.

Darfur: Rebel Chief Wants Security Before Talks

From Reuters

One of Darfur's most powerful rebel leaders will not take part in peace talks until a lasting ceasefire is put in place and security is restored, he said in an interview published on Wednesday.

Abdel Wahed Mohamed el-Nur has refused to join Darfur rebel commanders and groups who agreed a joint position last month, saying he wants international troops to disarm militias to secure the region before talks with the government.

In an interview with French newspaper Le Monde, Nur, whose backing is key to any peace deal, stuck to his position.

"I will refuse to take part in political negotiations as long as my people continue on the ground to be massacred, raped, colonised," he said.

Nur commands few troops but enjoys huge support among the 2.5 million people who have fled their homes to camps in Darfur and across the border in Chad during 4-1/2 years of fighting.

Mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing central government of marginalising the arid west. Khartoum mobilised militias, known as Janjaweed, to quell the revolt.

An 2006 peace deal was signed by only one of three negotiating factions, Nur's rival Minni Arcua Minnawi.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday that recent fighting in Darfur could derail peace talks he has announced will start in Libya next month.

Ban announced the talks jointly with the Sudanese government on September 6. He has reminded Khartoum that it promised a full cessation of hostilities ahead of the talks, due to start October 27.

"We are asking the international community for one thing and one thing only: security," Nur was quoted as saying. The newspaper said he wanted an end to violence and a ceasefire in place before he would take part in talks.

The United Nations has approved a 26,000-strong U.N. and African Union peacekeeping force for Darfur.

The head of U.N. peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guehenno, told Le Monde he was having trouble putting together the force's planned contingent of 6,000 policemen.

Further checks were needed to assess individual countries' offers to supply troops for the force, most of whose members are expected to be African.

"We have offers for most of the components. But we will have to verify whether these have the necessary equipment, especially for the first large waves to establish the mission without delay," Guehenno said.

"What worries me the most is the lack of technical transportation, trucks, helicopters," he added.

European countries, many of which have been vocal about the urgent need to help Darfur, have been slow in offering manpower, he said.

"It is true that there are not many European offers for the moment. Some are thinking, the Nordic countries are ready to commit themselves, but we do not have concrete proposals for high-level engineering units, to drill wells for example, or for transportation," he said.

Darfur: China Says Criticism "Incorrect'

From AFP

China's envoy on Darfur said on Tuesday that criticism of the country's relations with Sudan by international media and non-governmental organisations was "incorrect."

"Relations between the Chinese and Sudanese governments are no more special than our relations with other developing nations," Ambassador Liu Guijin told a press conference after a visit to the United States and United Nations.

"But the media and some non-government organisations criticise Sino-Sudanese relations and politicise the issue -- this is incorrect," China's representative on the Darfur issue said.

"We just have more economic cooperation," he added.

While in Washington earlier this month, Liu lashed out at critics who accuse the fast-rising Asian power of turning a blind eye to bloodshed in the Sudanese region out of economic self-interest.

Liu on Tuesday insisted that Beijing was playing a constructive role at the United Nations to bring about a peacekeeping force in Darfur but said critics sometimes overestimate China's influence on Sudan.

He reiterated China's policy of non-interference in foreign affairs and said applying political pressure is not conducive towards resolving conflicts.

Liu said China had been instrumental in pushing through a UN Security Council resolution in July that finally authorised a peacekeeping force for Darfur.

"We are glad we have played a positive role," he said.

China had previously blocked the resolution in the absence of an agreement with the Sudanese government, which is accused by Washington of waging "genocide" against thousands in Darfur suspected of supporting rebels.

China will send out a 315-member engineering unit next month to build bridges, roads and water wells in Darfur.

China, which is the biggest buyer of Sudan's oil, has been attempting to play down accusations it is worsening Darfur's agony by supporting the Khartoum regime.

Darfur: Be Prepared for Betrayal

From The Guardian

The former commander of the failed UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda yesterday warned the newly appointed head of a similar force in Darfur that he faced "long odds" against success and predicted he would be betrayed by the very officials and governments meant to be backing the mission.

In an open letter Roméo Dallaire, now a Canadian senator, advised Martin Agwai, the Nigerian general given the task of stopping the bloodshed in Darfur, to demand a clear chain of command, a broad mandate, proper resources and a rapid deployment. He also cautioned him to watch his back.

"You can anticipate being let down by everyone on whom you depend for support, be that troops, funding, logistics or political engagement," Senator Dallaire wrote. "Bear in mind that whoever fails you will, in the end, be the most active in blaming you for whatever goes wrong."

The outspoken letter was delivered on a Global Day for Darfur, involving protests in 30 countries focusing attention on the crisis in the west Sudanese province where an estimated 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million have been forced from their homes.

Gordon Brown yesterday promised technical support for the mission of General Agwai, who leads the 26,000-strong joint UN and African Union force, Unamid, set up following a security council resolution in July. The prime minister told the BBC he wanted Unamid to be in Darfur before the end of the year, or earlier.

Yesterday China announced it planned to send 315 personnel to help prepare for Unamid's arrival. African states have said they will provide the bulk of the 20,000 soldiers and 6,000 police but there is still considerable uncertainty over which countries will provide equipment and infrastructure. Deployment of the full force is expected to run into next year.

Calling the Darfur crisis "one of the great tragedies of our time" Mr Brown said that if the Sudanese government failed to play its role in bringing peace to the region, and in allowing the Unamid deployment, it would face further sanctions. Peace talks with Darfur rebels are planned for late October in Tripoli. The Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, has pledged that the government will observe a ceasefire during negotiations.

The Unamid force is an experimental hybrid, and the division of responsibilities between the UN and AU is as yet vague.

Senator Dallaire's first piece of advice for General Agwai is that he should insist his political bosses in the UN and the AU sort out the chain of command; he will also need to "prevent intervention from Khartoum", predicted to try to dilute Unamid's powers to protect civilians. "This is a daunting mandate, and you enter into this mission facing long odds," Senator Dallaire said. "The intentions of the regime in Khartoum toward an effective, impartial implementation of the Unamid mandate are deeply uncertain."

But the retired general's sharpest words question the political resolve of the UN and AU, which he says should be held to account for any lack of support when the new force is deployed. "Only by shining a spotlight on those failures in every possible way can you mobilise the attention necessary to get the action you need," is the advice he offers General Agwai.

Senator Dallaire's warnings are relevant given his experience in Rwanda in 1994. His calls for reinforcements to help his UN force stop the genocide there were rejected by the security council. He was discharged from the Canadian army in 2000 suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. He tried to take his life several times but recovered and became a prominent human rights advocate.

Darfur: Civilians Still Abused with Impunity

From DPA

Civilians are still murdered and women sexually violated in Darfur, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said Monday accusing the Sudanese Government of inaction.

Speaking to reporters in Geneva, Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said: 'Human rights violations seemed to be continuing of the same nature and practically on the same scale,' Louise Arbour.

Darfur was still a matter of 'grave preoccupation.' After four-and a-half-years of conflict in the west of Sudan, she said there had seemed to have been 'very little progress on national efforts on the ground to combat the culture of impunity.'

Periodic reports on human rights 'gave little cause for optimism,' she said and there was little sign that 'things are turning around.' Civilians in the refugee camps, particularly women, were still regularly targeted.

'There is no sign of a change in attitude by the Sudanese government in responding to the warrants issued by the International Criminal Court,' she added.

In May, the court issued the first arrest warrants for suspected war crimes in Sudan. They were for Ahmad Muhammad Harun, currently minister of state for humanitarian affairs, and Ali Muhammad Ali Abd- al-Rahman, also known as Ali Kushayb, a militia Janjaweed leader who was accused of personally leading attacks on four villages in West Darfur.

Together the two had been charged with 51 counts of crimes against humanity, including persecution, murder, rape and 'other forms of sexual violence, torture, cruel treatment, and unlawful imprisonment.'

Khartoum has failed to hand over the men. However, the High Commissioner believed two factors could lead to an improvement. 'The slightly more energized peace process bringing in rebel forces and the deployment of a hybrid force give hope that human rights could improve,' she said.

The UN Human Rights Council, currently meeting in Geneva, was 'very engaged' in Darfur and Arbour expected to hear from the Council again on this issue possibly during its session in December.

The council had dispatched a special mission of inquiry to Sudan in February. It had been refused entry and its subsequent report accusing Sudan of orchestrating war crimes in Darfur was dismissed as biased by Khartoum.

According to UN estimates, an estimated 200,000 people have died and 2 million have been displaced since 2003 and the start of the conflict between the government, allied janjaweed groups and other armed rebel factions in Darfur.

From Reuters

Violence is increasing in camps for displaced people in Darfur, where nearly a quarter million people have been displaced so far this year, a U.N. report said on Monday.

The United Nations said rising violence in the overcrowded camps of the remote region of western Sudan was making it harder to carry out humanitarian aid work to help the thousands of newcomers arriving each week.

"Over 240,000 people have been newly displaced or re-displaced during 2007," the U.N. report said. "In many IDP (internally displaced people) camps, armed elements are present, and violent incidents are increasing."

"During August humanitarian activities had to be suspended in several camps due to insecurity," the report added.

More than four years of ethnic and political conflict in Darfur has left 200,000 dead and driven another 2.5 million from their homes, international experts say. Khartoum says that is an exaggeration, and puts the death toll at 9,000.

The central Khartoum government has agreed to hold talks with rebel groups in Libya on Oct. 27 to try to end the violence in Darfur, which pits largely African rebels against mostly Arab militias mobilised to quell a 2003 revolt.

The United Nations said that humanitarian operations had to be suspended due to insecurity in Zalingei Camp in West Darfur for two days this year, while Kalma camp in the south was closed to aid operations for three days.

Since the beginning of the year, the report said, humanitarian workers have been forced to move out on 24 occasions, adversely affecting aid work.

Heavy rains, which have affected much of Sudan, including Darfur, also brought new problems, the U.N. report said.

"Worsening sanitary conditions in the IDP camps have led to a spread of waterborne diseases. In some cases, this has been accompanied by worsening malnutrition rates which, although localised, have required and received urgent responses," it said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also expressed concern about the growing insecurity.

"The precarious security situation makes it extremely hard to plan and carry out field activities," Denise Duran, head of the ICRC's Darfur operation, said in a statement. "This means that the communities most at risk in rural areas are often reachable only sporadically."

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has said he is willing to observe a ceasefire in Darfur from the start of the Libya talks, but fighting has continued since the talks were announced especially around the rebel-held town of Haskanita.

In an effort to encourage peace in Darfur, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said he would lead a top-level delegation on a tour of Darfur, in the first mission of a group of international "Elders" set up by Nelson Mandela this year.

Tutu said he would visit Khartoum and Darfur with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela's wife Graca Machel and veteran U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5.

Tutu said: "We want community leaders in Darfur to feel that they have been heard by us. And to the extent that we could then communicate their aspirations, their longings, particularly the women's groups, we will do so."

Darfur: Rebels Call Assembly Ahead of Peace Talks

From Reuters

A Darfur rebel group said on Sunday it was planning an assembly of fighters, supporters and displaced families to work out demands ahead of peace talks with Khartoum set for October.

Khalil Ibrahim, head of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), said he expected more than 2,000 people to attend the meeting in an undisclosed rebel-held area of Darfur on Oct. 25, two days before the peace talks start in Libya.

"We want everyone to come, supporters here, supporters abroad, refugees, IDPs (internally displaced people), students, women. It will take place in a liberated area. We want to talk about peace, about their demands, so we can take them to the peace talks," he said.

Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir released a joint statement with the United Nations on Sept. 6 agreeing to hold talks in Libya on Oct. 27, cease hostilities in Darfur and prepare for the arrival of a 26,000-strong joint U.N. and African Union peacekeeping force.

More than four years of fighting has left 200,000 people dead in Darfur and driven another 2.5 million from their homes, international experts say. Khartoum has accused the western media of exaggerating the figures.

Ibrahim urged Bashir to cease hostilities before the talks, saying violence in the interim could threaten their success.

"If he is planning to carry on attacks right up to the talks, then we will not be able to go to Libya."

Bashir has said his government was willing to observe a ceasefire in Darfur from the start of the Libyan negotiations.

Fighting has continued in the western region since the talks were announced. Last week, JEM and another rebel group accused the government of using helicopter gunships and Antonov aircraft to attack their positions in the northern town of Haskanita.

The government said it had been caught in a rebel ambush.

Darfur: Activists Urge Leaders Not to Look Away

From the AP

Protesters held demonstrations in several countries to urge world leaders and the U.N. General Assembly to work harder to end the crisis in Darfur.

In London, hundreds of activists took part, many donning black blindfolds to symbolize the international community's failure to act since vowing to stop atrocities in Darfur two years ago.

Demonstrators in Rome wore white T-shirts with a bloodstained hand on the front and marched to the Italian city's central Piazza Farnese. They carried a peace torch, which they said was lit in Chad, where hundreds of thousands from Darfur now live in refugee camps.

In Belgium, a few dozen people demonstrated outside the Palace of Justice in Brussels.

Organizers of Sunday's events — who planned protests in more than 30 countries, including Australia, Egypt, Germany, Japan, Mongolia, Nigeria, South Africa and the United States — said some in the international community had become complacent since the U.N. Security Council approved plans on July 31 for a 26,000-strong peacekeeping force for the vast, war-battered region in western Sudan.

The deployment of the joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping force faces delays, however, due to a lack of aviation, transport and logistics units, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said.

The U.N. General Assembly and world leaders planned to discuss the Darfur crisis at their meeting this week in New York.

More than 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been uprooted since ethnic African rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government in 2003, accusing it of decades of neglect. Sudan's government is accused of retaliating by unleashing a militia of Arab nomads known as the janjaweed — a charge it denies.

Activists say Darfur's violence is increasing, and they are demanding the peacekeeping force be deployed swiftly, and that the international community pressure all sides in the conflict to end the violence.

"The world has acknowledged the atrocities in Darfur. And its leaders have promised to end them. Now they must fulfill that promise," said Colleen Connors from Globe for Darfur, a coalition of aid groups working in Darfur.

"The meeting of world leaders in the next two weeks is a critical juncture for the people of Darfur," she said. "We simply cannot afford to look away now."

In London, protesters marched from the Sudanese Embassy near St. James's Park to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's 10 Downing St. office, waving signs reading "Stop genocide in Darfur" and "Rape, torture, murder. How much longer for Darfur?"

Britain's newly appointed Africa Minister Lord Malloch Brown, who recently visited Sudan, said in a speech that while Darfur's large number of killings has declined, the situation there remains dire.

"If you are a woman, child or male civilian, it seems every bit as dangerous today as two years ago. There is no more certainty that there will be a political solution," he said.

Playwright Tom Stoppard, who joined the demonstration, said: "I'm here today I think for the same reason as everybody else, to have one more body supporting what is really one of the most important junctures of the whole Darfur story so far."

Actors Matt Damon, Don Cheedle, supermodel Elle MacPherson and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu are among the celebrities who appear in a video filmed for the day in which they hold up slogans demanding action.

"The people of Darfur need peace and they need it now. To make peace a possibility governments should push for an immediate cease-fire and supply the peacekeepers they have talked about for months," Damon said.

Tutu called Darfur "the world's largest concentration of human suffering," adding "it's also entirely avoidable if people speak out."

Britain and China pledged new support Sunday for the hybrid peacekeeping force.

Britain would likely provide technical support for peacekeepers, as well as additional support for the African countries contributing to the force, said Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who helped push the British-French resolution on Darfur through the U.N. Security Council.

"I want to see the hybrid force in place before the end of the year," Brown told the British Broadcasting Corp. "I want to see it there, if at all possible, earlier than that."

Beijing, which is trying to counter criticism that it is reluctant to support international intervention in Darfur, said it would send 315 people.

The Chinese group — comprised of Chinese engineer platoons, a well-digging platoon, and a field hospital team — will build roads, bridges and dig wells before the larger U.N.-AU force arrives, China's Defense Ministry said, according to state media.

Critics have attempted to shame China, one of Sudan's major trading partners, into action by linking China's failure to act in the Darfur crisis to calls for a boycott next year's Summer Olympics in the Chinese capital.

Sunday's events were organized by a coalition of more than 50 organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Save Darfur Coalition.

Hopes of a cease-fire were boosted Saturday, when Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir said Khartoum was ready to call a cease-fire when peace talks get under way in Libya's capital on Oct. 27.

Darfur: In China, a Display of Resolve

From the Washington Post

The Chinese military put on a display of its first Darfur-bound peacekeepers Saturday, having troops throw up Bailey bridges and feign combat to dramatize Beijing's desire to be seen as a partner in bringing peace to the violence-torn corner of Sudan.

The training demonstration, by an engineering unit of the People's Liberation Army, was observed by foreign journalists as part of a new campaign by the Chinese government to show that it is cooperating with the United States and other nations to end the Darfur fighting, which since 2003 has displaced about 2.5 million people and contributed to the deaths of as many as 450,000 from violence and disease.

Military engineers wearing U.N.-blue caps worked feverishly to build a stretch of road, erect a bridge and put together a prefab shelter designed to serve as a headquarters building. Force protection troops, meanwhile, simulated reacting to an ambush and sped about the training grounds here in armored personnel carriers in what an army announcer called "a military training show."

In another facet of China's initiative, its special diplomatic envoy for Darfur, Liu Guijin, repeatedly has sought in Washington and at the United Nations to broadcast China's role in persuading the Sudanese government to drop its opposition to a full U.N. peacekeeping force. After long delays caused by hesitations in Khartoum, the Security Council decided in late July to dispatch to Darfur a 26,000-member force -- the largest peacekeeping unit in the world -- and deployment is scheduled to begin by the end of the year. Since then, several nations have redoubled their efforts to get peace negotiations underway.

"On the resolution of the Darfur issue, we have played a very constructive and even unique role," Liu said to reporters this week at U.N. headquarters in New York.

China's previous unwillingness to be seen pressuring the Sudanese government had generated appeals for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, endangering what the Communist Party government hopes will be a showcase at home and abroad for the country's swift economic transformation. With Olympic enthusiasm high among the Chinese public, anything that casts a shadow over the Games would become a political problem for President Hu Jintao and the party.

Several U.S. entertainment figures, including Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg, raised the idea of a boycott earlier this year. Joining the chorus, 108 members of the U.S. House of Representatives wrote a letter to the Chinese government in May warning that the Beijing Games could be spoiled unless China became more actively involved in stopping the violence in Sudan.

It is unclear to what degree the Security Council's decision and Sudan's willingness to accept the U.N. force have dissipated the threat of an Olympic boycott. Spielberg, for instance, had threatened to back out of his role as artistic adviser for the opening ceremony; his spokesman did not respond to a question whether the threat still stands.

China has become Sudan's largest oil customer in recent years and has signed large-scale oil exploration deals with the government in Khartoum. In addition, it has sold weapons to the Sudanese military. In that light, China's critics argue that it should be doing more to make sure the Darfur conflict is resolved and the region's dire humanitarian situation is tended to. The Bush administration, while lauding China for trying to help, had complained repeatedly that Beijing's diplomats were not using their full influence to push Sudan.

The training exercises, at this base in Henan province 400 miles south of Beijing, involved a 315-man force of military engineers who are scheduled to deploy to Darfur early next month. Their mission, officers said, is to lay groundwork for the full U.N. peacekeeping force by building roads, bridges and landing strips.

Senior Col. Dai Shaoan of the Defense Ministry's peacekeeping affairs bureau said the Chinese force will include several construction units, a force protection unit and a medical unit. China has not yet decided whether to contribute combat troops to the full U.N. force, he said, but will "study positively any request from the United Nations."

The engineering force will take 145 vehicles, including armored personnel carriers, bulldozers and trucks, he said. It is made up entirely of volunteer officers and enlisted men who will serve eight-month rotations in Darfur, he added.

"They are all the top troops from their former units," Dai said.

Lt. Col. Shangguan Linhong, who will command the first rotation, said his men, in addition to military training, have studied the origins of the Darfur conflict and the geography and customs of the area where they will be deployed. Although the region is overwhelmingly Muslim, Dai said the Chinese military has not sought out Muslim troops for this peacekeeping unit or others in Muslim areas.

China, which avoided contributing to U.N. peacekeeping missions until 1990, has sent more than 8,000 soldiers abroad since then. The Defense Ministry said 1,648 Chinese soldiers are serving in U.N. peacekeeping forces now, including those in Lebanon, Liberia and Congo.

Dai, sweating in the Chinese military's new olive-green uniform as he answered reporters' questions, deflected queries about the criticism directed at China and the threats of an Olympic boycott. "If you and I are friends and I have problems with my brothers and sisters, nobody can blame you for that," he said.

Darfur: Rebel Leader Scoffs at Sudan Ceasefire Call

From Reuters

The leader of an umbrella Darfur rebel group on Saturday scoffed at Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's comments that Khartoum was willing to observe a ceasefire in Sudan's troubled western region.

Khamis Abdallah, head of the United Front for Liberation and Development (UFLD) -- founded in Eritrea in July, also said he was sceptical that Sudan's ruling party would abide by any possible deal reached at peace talks in Libya in October.

"We know Bashir. When he talks about a ceasefire, he's not credible. We are seeing an escalation of military operations, which means he's saying this for political reasons," Khamis told Reuters in an interview.

"(Sudan's ruling party) is not implementing the CPA, so how can they implement any other deals?" he said, referring to a 2005 agreement between Khartoum and southern rebels that ended a decades-old conflict killing some 2 million people.

Khamis said the group had not yet received an invitation for peace talks scheduled for Libya next month, and would discuss whether to go with the other four insurgent groups that form the UFLD.

Darfur insurgents fractured into more than a dozen armed groups after an unpopular peace deal last year with Khartoum that only one faction signed.

On a visit to Italy this week, Bashir said Khartoum was willing to comply with a ceasefire from the start of peace talks with rebels in Libya.

But another ceasefire -- agreed upon in April 2004 -- has been violated frequently, with fighting blamed on government troops, rebels and Janjaweed militias.

Darfur: Beshir Offers Ceasefire, Blasts Rebels, Dismisses ICC

From AFP

Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir said Friday he was ready to call a ceasefire in the war-torn province of Darfur ahead of October peace talks while accusing rebels of prolonging the conflict.

"We think a number of factions are not ready for peace. They are enjoying their stay in luxurious hotels in Europe," Beshir told an evening news conference in Rome. "We can say they are marketing the suffering of their people in Darfur."

Beshir made the ceasefire offer ahead of his first meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, who voiced his "heartfelt hope" for the success of the peace talks, the Vatican said.

"We stated that we are prepared for a ceasefire for the start of negotiations in order to create a positive climate conducive to a positive end to the negotiations," Beshir said after talks with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

The Sudanese government and Darfur rebels who refused to sign a peace agreement are to hold talks in Tripoli from October 27.

Several ceasefires have already broken down. But last month, UN and African Union mediators brokered talks in Tanzania between the myriad rebel factions to thrash out a common platform for new talks with the government.

The African Union mission in Sudan said only on Tuesday, however, that it was deeply concerned about renewed fighting.

Beshir faces mounting international pressure over the Darfur conflict, which has killed at least 200,000 people and displaced two million since 2003, according to UN figures.

The Sudanese leader stated Friday that 350,000 internally displaced people "have returned voluntarily to their homes and villages."

The conflict, which the United States has called "genocide", started after Beshir's government enlisted Janjaweed Arab militia allies to help put down an ethnic minority rebellion.

The Sudanese president said he asked Prodi to pressure "certain European countries harbouring some of these rebel groups" to persuade them to come to the negotiating table.

"Every day we see a new faction, more splintering, even a group riding only three cars," Beshir said, adding: "I would like to declare the coming negotiations will be final ... Any party (not honouring it) should be subject to punishment."

During Beshir's audience with Benedict at the papal residence at Castel Gandolfo near Rome late Friday morning, the Vatican said "very positive views were expressed concerning fresh peace negotiations for Darfur."

A Vatican communique said: "It is the Holy See's heartfelt hope that these negotiations prove successful in order to put an end to the suffering and insecurity of those peoples."

For his part, Prodi called on Beshir's government to make "realistic contributions" to the October negotiations. He pledged financial help, transport and logistical assistance, as well as training for a UN peacekeeping force to be deployed in Darfur.

Also Friday, the US group Human Rights Watch urged both Prodi and the pope to call for the arrest of International Criminal Court (ICC) suspects including Sudan's State Minister for Humanitarian Affairs Ahmed Haroun.

The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Haroun in April citing 42 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The court highlighted evidence that Haroun recruited, paid and armed Janjaweed accused of raping and killing civilians in Darfur in 2003 and 2004.

Haroun is now in charge of hearing human rights complaints from Darfur abuse victims.

"Nominating a suspected war criminal to hear human rights complaints from Darfur's victims is outrageous and shows the government's utter disregard for their plight," said Lotte Leicht, EU advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

But Beshir told the evening news conference: "This issue is not our business. We don't have anything to do with this court, so we're not going to waste our time answering questions about it. We are not part of the Rome protocol."

What I Saw in Darfur

An op-ed by Ban Ki-moon in The Washington Post. - via ENOUGH

We speak often and easily about Darfur. But what can we say with surety? By conventional shorthand, it is a society at war with itself. Rebels battle the government; the government battles the rebels. Yet the reality is more complicated. Lately, the fighting often as not pits tribe against tribe, warlord against warlord.

Nor is the crisis confined to Darfur. It has spilled over borders, destabilizing the region. Darfur is also an environmental crisis -- a conflict that grew at least in part from desertification, ecological degradation and a scarcity of resources, foremost among them water.

I have just returned from a week in Darfur and the surrounding region. I went to listen to the candid views of its people -- Sudanese officials, villagers displaced by fighting, humanitarian aid workers, the leaders of neighboring countries. I came away with a clear understanding. There can be no single solution to this crisis. Darfur is a case study in complexity. If peace is to come, it must take into account all the elements that gave rise to the conflict.

Everything I saw and heard convinced me that this is possible. And we must succeed. Outside El Fasher, the largest city in North Darfur, I visited the El Salam camp, which is sheltering some 45,000 internally displaced people. My heart went out to them. I felt their hopelessness and frustration. I saw children who had not seen life outside the camps. I wanted to give them a sign. I promised that we would do our best to bring peace and to help them return to their villages.

We have made a good start. The U.N. Security Council has authorized the deployment of 26,000 multinational peacekeepers, jointly conducted by the United Nations and the African Union (A.U.). In going to Darfur, I saw the difficult conditions our forces will encounter -- and saw, too, that our logistical preparations are underway.

No peacekeeping mission can succeed without a peace to keep. We need to push, hard, for a political settlement as well. Indeed, that was the principal purpose of my trip.

In Khartoum, the government of President Omar al-Bashir renewed its unqualified commitment to support the peacekeeping mission as well as comprehensive peace talks. We agreed that negotiations should begin in Libya on Oct. 27, under joint A.U.-U.N. leadership. The government also confirmed its pledge to an immediate cessation of hostilities, as the rebel groups did last month in Arusha. Within hours of my visit, however, there were reports of tensions, clashes and bombings in the northern Darfur town of Haskanita. It is important that both parties exercise restraint and create conditions conducive to the talks.

In dealing with Darfur, we must look beyond it. In Juba, the capital of South Sudan, political leaders are worried that Darfur could deflect attention from the peace agreement signed two years ago, ending a long civil war. As we tend to Darfur, we must not neglect this fragile situation, lest a broader war break out anew and undermine all our efforts.

Any peace must have deep roots if it is to endure. In Juba and El Fasher, I heard about the importance of listening to the voices of a broad range of society -- tribal leaders, representatives of independent political movements, women's and refugee groups, local and national officials. We need a social contract for peace.

When I met Libya's leader, Col. Moammar Gaddafi, in his tent in Sirte, he generously offered to host the peace talks and assured me that he would do his utmost to help make them a success. "It is now or never," he said, emphasizing the widespread view that these negotiations must be final.

During my visit, I was shown Gaddafi's Great Manmade River: hundreds of miles of pipeline carrying millions of gallons of fresh water from beneath the Sahara. In a region where water is so scarce, this is remarkable. Flying over Lake Chad -- a vast inland sea that has shrunk to one-tenth its original size -- the previous day, it was obvious that this region's future also depends on supplies of water.

In N'Djamena, Chad, President Idriss Deby told me that without water, there can be no economic development. Without the prospect of economic advancement, he went on, the quarter-million Darfuri refugees living in the eastern part of his country might never go home. Security and development, he said, go hand in hand. In this regard, the international community can play an important role.

All this underscores the need for a comprehensive approach to the conflict in Darfur. Solutions cannot be piecemeal. The crisis grew from many causes. We must deal with all of them -- security, politics, resources, water, and humanitarian and development issues.

Dealing with complexity makes our work more challenging and difficult. Yet it is the only path to a lasting solution.

CAR: Elite African Guard Unit Accused of Atrocities

From the New York Times [The HRW report is here]

An elite presidential guard unit of the military in the Central African Republic is primarily responsible for countless atrocities committed against civilians in the northern part of the country since 2005, according to a Human Rights Watch report released today.

The report offers a grim and detailed portrait of the violence that has convulsed northern Central African Republic since a disputed 2005 election won by a former general who had seized power in 2003, François Bozizé. The government is trying to put down two rebellions in the remote northern regions of the country, vast swaths of territory with no paved roads or electricity and a long history of lawlessness.

“The reprisal and counterinsurgency tactics of the C.A.R. security forces have affected the lives of over 1 million people,” the report said, “and have forced an estimated 212,000 civilians to abandon their road-side homes and live deep inside the bush, too fearful to return to their burned villages in case of repeat attack. Another 78,000 have sought refuge in neighboring Chad and Cameroon.”

Researchers documented 119 summary executions and other illegal killings of civilians, the report said, with at least 51 of them, including the beheading of a teacher, carried out by a single presidential guard unit based in the northwestern town of Bossangoa. The presidential guard is controlled by Mr. Bozizé, the report said, and operates outside the normal command of the military.

One of the rebellions the government is trying to quell, in the northwest corner of the country, is led by a poorly equipped group of fighters led by supporters of the man Mr. Bozizé overthrew, Ange Félix Patassé. They are reinforced by locals from the region tired of being harassed and attacked by bandits, who kidnap children for ransom.

The second rebellion is in the northeast, near the border with Sudan, among ethnic groups cut off from much of the country. These rebels say their region has been ignored by the government and is underdeveloped, even by the already low standards of one of the very poorest nations in the world.

While most of the atrocities documented were committed by government forces, the report said, the rebels in both regions had preyed upon the local population, exacting illegal taxes, carrying out executions and in one case, killing a French aid worker.

A landlocked former French colony that is roughly the size of Texas, the Central African Republic ranks five places from the bottom of the United Nations Human Development Index. Most adults will not reach the age of 40, hunger is chronic, and instability is a way of life. The country’s history is laced with violence — virtually every government has taken power or fallen by force.

The violence in Central African Republic has been linked by some diplomats and aid officials to the crisis in neighboring Darfur and eastern Chad, but the Human Rights Watch report concluded that there was little evidence of a direct link, even if the crisis there has had a destabilizing effect on one of the most fragile nations in the world.

“Suggesting Darfur is the catalyst ignores the reality of the conflict in northern CAR and obscures the issue of responsibility and accountability for human rights abuses, the report concluded. “The vast majority of the major atrocities being committed in northwestern CAR — the widespread summary executions and other unlawful killings, and the massive burning of villages — have been committed by government troops, not by forces supported by outside elements.”

Day for Darfur

This weekend is the 4th Day for Darfur

On Sunday September 16th, thousands of activists will come together in cities around the world to send off their country's delegations to the United Nations General Assembly in New York with a united message: 'Don't Look Away Now'.

This will be the 4th 'Day for Darfur' celebrated across the globe, with hundreds of events having taken place in more than 200 cities since the campaign began in September 2006.

The message of the day urges the international community to honour their responsibility to protect the people of Darfur and ensure the full and expeditious deployment of the AU-UN hybrid peacekeeping force authorised by UN Resolution 1769. Furthermore, all UN delegations are urged to ensure that the Government of Sudan facilitates the swift and unimpeded deployment of the peacekeepers.

Since the 'Responsibility to Protect' was signed in September 2005, an extra million people require assistance, another half million have been driven from their homes, and thousands more have lost their lives. The conflict in Darfur has spread beyond Sudan's borders, affecting hundreds of thousands of civilians in eastern Chad.

This September, our leaders must not look away: they must speak out as one and show their commitment to protect the people of Darfur and eastern Chad. Please join our call to world leaders and spread the message.

Chad/CAR: Thousands Flee Violence Along Border

From United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

The entire population of some 12,000 people has now fled from their homes in the area between the towns of Markounda and Silambi, in the north of the Central African Republic (CAR) on the border with neighbouring Chad, according to the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for CAR, Toby Lanzer. For months, civilians have been caught between various armed factions, including state and non-state actors from CAR and Chad. In late August, reports from the region made it clear that, following a particularly acute period of violence, the population had escaped into the bush. A United Nations mission, led by Mr. Lanzer, traveled to the Markounda-Silambi axis in the Ouham prefecture 500 kilometres or twelve hours north of the capital, Bangui, from 7 to 10 September.

The consequences for the 12,000 people who were living along the axis are immediate and grave. While in July only 5,000 people were displaced along the axis, and many of them were on their way home, the entire population has now been displaced. “Conditions are abominable – marked by constant driving rain and night-time temperatures dipping to 15 degrees Celsius,” said Mr. Lanzer. “All this comes at the height of the lean season, when people are at the end of their ropes,” he added. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) have no shelter or potable water, no health care and no basic items such as cooking pots or soap. Reports indicate a sharp increase in acute respiratory infections amongst the displaced population.

Noting the deterioration in CAR's north, United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC), John Holmes, called on all parties to create conditions that would enable the displaced to return home. “We are approaching the harvest in the coming weeks, and people need to get to their fields. If not, hunger will inevitably follow,” said Mr. Holmes. The United Nations and its partners will continue to work in the region this week in order to increase humanitarian aid there. To respond to the needs of the displaced, the United Nations and partners have mobilized $43 million against the appeal total of $83 million. The ERC may approve an allocation from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) to supplement the funds available. Further donor contributions are urgently required, particularly in light of the limited capacity of local authorities to protect and assist the affected population.

Internal conflict in the Central African Republic has forced almost 300,000 people to flee their homes during the past eighteen months. In addition, conflicts in Chad and the Darfur region of Sudan loom large over the people in the northern regions of the country.

Darfur: Bashir Talks Peace with Pope

From the Financial Times

Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whose regime has been sanctioned and largely isolated by western governments for atrocities committed in Darfur, on Friday met Pope Benedict XVI and Italy's prime minister Romano Prodi during a rare visit to Europe.

Both the Vatican and the Italian government sought to fend off criticism for welcoming Mr Bashir - one of whose ministers is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes - by using the opportunity to press him to reach a peace agreement with Darfur's disparate rebel groups at talks scheduled to be held in Libya next month.

Mr Bashir gave his hosts at least something they could show for their efforts by saying his government was willing to observe a ceasefire for the talks due to start on October 27. He also used a press conference after meeting Mr Prodi to urge Europe to ease sanctions against Khartoum and put pressure on rebel leaders – some of whom are based in Europe – to attend the talks.

Italy announced on Friday it would provide aircraft and training teams to help a 26,000-strong "hybrid" UN-African Union peacekeeping force that is scheduled to start deploying in Darfur before the end of the year.

The Vatican said the pope, who met the Sudanese president at his summer residence of Castel Gandolfo near Rome, expressed his "heartfelt hope" that the negotiations would succeed. The Vatican said "very positive views were expressed" but gave no details.

Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, described the atmosphere as "very respectful" and said the Sudanese delegation showed "great commitment" to the meeting with the pope.

They also discussed the peace agreement that ended decades of civil war between Sudan's mainly Islamic north and its animist and Christian south. That conflict severely strained ties with the Vatican and led Pope John Paul II to visit Khartoum briefly in 1993 when he met Mr Bashir.

Mr Bashir's large delegation included Sudanese officials representing the south - largely excluded from western sanctions - who were expected to discuss economic development with Italian ministers.

Sudanese forces were reported to have launched an attack against the Justice and Equality rebel group in Darfur this week, using helicopters and aircraft in violation of a UN embargo.

The special US envoy for Sudan, Andrew Natsios, has called for a new oversight commission to enforce a ceasefire agreed in 2004 but repeatedly broken by both sides.

Chad: Rebels Warn EU Force Against Interference

From Reuters

Chadian rebels warned on Friday they would fight a European Union peacekeeping force destined for the eastern border region with Darfur if it tried to obstruct their struggle to topple President Idriss Deby.

The EU plans to start deploying a protection force of up to 4,000 troops in Chad and Central African Republic next month to help protect refugees from Sudan's Darfur region and Chadian civilians displaced by violence.

Political and ethnic fighting in Darfur, which has killed tens of thousands of people since 2003 and displaced more than two million, has often spilled into eastern Chad, where several rebel groups are fighting a separate battle to oust Deby.

"If they come on the pretext of Darfur and block our advance on the capital we will not allow them to do so," said Albissaty Saleh Allazan, a leader of the Assembly of the Forces of Change (RFC), one of Chad's rebel groups.

"They will receive a very, very bad welcome. If they don't touch us, ok. But we will be advancing on N'Djamena. If they get in the way, they will see what we are made of," he told reporters in Senegal's capital Dakar.

The insurgents launched a series of raids on government forces along a more than 400 km (250 mile) stretch of border earlier this year, a desolate expanse of parched earth and dusty scrub already destabilised by the conflict in Darfur.

Their boldest strike was in April 2006, when they sped across the country from the eastern border and attacked N'Djamena, the western capital, three weeks before an election which returned Deby for a third term in office.

Local civilians and refugees from Darfur have been exposed to random attacks in the cat-and-mouse war in which the rebel strategy has often been lightning surprise assaults and equally rapid retreats aimed at throwing the Chadian army off guard.

"If (the EU force) deploys to secure Darfur we won't get in the way. But if they get in the way of our strikes on government positions, there will be clashes," said Makaila Nguebla, a rebel spokesman living in exile in Dakar.

Deby, a former French-trained helicopter pilot, has ruled Chad since seizing power in a 1990 revolt from the east.

He amended the constitution in 2005 to remove a two-term limit for heads of state and an age limit of 70 for presidential candidates, clearing the way for his re-election last year in polls boycotted as unfair by opponents.

The rebels said they doubted the motives of the EU mission to Chad, noting the international community had long been silent about what the rebels say are widespread rights abuses by Deby's clan-based and autocratic administration.

A French military jet fired warning shots to check a rebel column advancing on N'Djamena in April 2006, seen as evidence by the insurgents that Paris wants to keep Deby in power.

"If the real intention of the West is to come and provide security for the population of Darfur, we agree ... But I don't in the least believe in the good intentions of this army," said Allazan, a university professor in N'Djamena before he fled.

Darfur: Bashir Says Sudan to Observe Casefire

From Reuters [AP article here, AFP article here]

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said on Friday that his government would observe a ceasefire in Darfur after peace talks start next month, on a visit to Rome that has drawn criticism in Italy and abroad.

He urged Europe to pressure rebel leaders to attend talks with Khartoum due to start on Oct. 27 in Libya, saying he hoped they would be the last of their kind and finally bring peace.

"We have given our government's willingness for a ceasefire from the start of the peace talks," he said through a translator at a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

The Italian leader, criticised by European parliamentarians and local politicians for welcoming Bashir, called this a strong and important signal for peace.

A ceasefire was agreed in April 2004 but has been violated frequently, with fighting blamed on government troops, rebels and Janjaweed militias. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has urged all parties to cease fire immediately.

International experts estimate that more than four years of violence in Darfur has killed 200,000 people and displaced 2.5 million. Khartoum disputes the figures.

Prodi said he expressed frankly the "serious concerns" of Italy and other countries over the Darfur crisis to Bashir, who meets Pope Benedict later on Friday.

It is the Sudanese president's first visit to the Vatican -- which has criticised his government for human rights abuses -- since coming to power in an Islamist-backed coup in 1989.

Italy has agreed to send aid and helicopters, train troops and give financial support to peacekeeping operations in the region, a political aide to Prodi said.

His government earlier had to defend itself from criticism by a group of European parliamentarians who expressed surprise and concern that Prodi would welcome a man "primarily responsible for the slaughter in Darfur".

One Italian opposition leader said Bashir should not be met with a red carpet but with a firm hand.

Prodi's government has said Bashir's visit would be useful for underlining the common concerns of the international community on the crisis in Darfur.

Bashir said he had offered Prodi details on how the humanitarian conditions in Darfur had improved. He urged European nations to push for an easing in sanctions and to put pressure on rebels living in Europe to attend the peace talks.

Rebel leader Abdel Wahed Mohamed el-Nur, who commands huge popularity among camps for displaced Darfuris, lives in Paris and has said he will not take part in fresh talks until a promised U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force is in place.

Bashir appeared visibly uncomfortable when asked why his government was not disarming the Janjaweed. The government maintains they are outlaws and denies supporting them.

"One should ask who started military operations. We say rebels clearly started military operations," he said. "They forced the government to retaliate to defend itself."

Darfur: Arabs Displaced Amid Fight Over Land

From Reuters

Arabs in Sudan's Darfur region are being displaced as they fight over land abandoned by Africans who have fled to refugee camps in a new trend in the conflict-ridden area, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday.

President George W. Bush's special envoy to Sudan Andrew Natsios told reporters in Berlin he was worried by the development which was pushing up mortality rates in the region.

He also said some evidence suggested the Sudanese government was undertaking a population resettlement programme by bringing in Arabs from Niger and Chad.

"There have been 200,000 people displaced in fighting this year -- it is not, however, who we think it is," said Natsios.

"It is Arabs being displaced for the first time. They are fighting with each other over land they are taking away from Africans who are in the camps ... that is a troubling trend.

"They have been killing each other and burning each others' villages down to control that land. That's causing a lot of displacement and that is increasing the malnutrition rates."

Rebels in Sudan's western Darfur region took up arms against the government in 2003, saying Khartoum discriminated against non-Arab farmers.

Khartoum mobilised proxy Arab militia to help quell the revolt. Some of the militiamen pillaged villages and killed civilians but the government denies supporting them.

As a result of the ethnic and political conflict, international experts estimate 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have fled their homes in the last 4-1/2 years. Many now live in squalid camps.

Natsios said he had talked to the Sudanese government about the new displacement and said some people claimed the Sudanese government was encouraging the trend.

"There is evidence the Sudanese are doing a population resettlement programme where they are bringing Arabs from Niger and Chad into western Darfur, giving them land and citizenship papers so they can vote in the election," he said.

Natsios also said mortality rates had risen in the last few months in Darfur due to a strong rainy season and floods.

"The sewage mixes with drinking water; that makes people sick and the malnutrition rate goes up," said Natsios, adding that action was being taken to contain the problems.

The envoy also said there were risks for the peace talks between Khartoum and Darfur rebel groups which are due to start on October 27 in Libya.

He said both sides could easily fall back into hardened positions where they were unable to make compromises.

"If the groups are being obstructive, I think we will have to use aggressive diplomatic measures like sanctions -- individual sanctions on people," he said.

Uganda: The Need to Maintain Momentum

A new report from the International Crisis Group

Peace talks between the Ugandan government and the insurgent Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) are moving in the right direction, but the core issues – justice, security and livelihoods – are still to be resolved and require difficult decisions, including on the fate of LRA leaders whom the International Criminal Court (ICC) has indicted. The 2 May 2007 agreement on comprehensive solutions to the conflict and the 29 June agreement on reconciliation and accountability revived momentum for the year-old talks in the southern Sudan town of Juba. Rebel elements in southern Sudan moved to the LRA’s jungle hideout near Garamba National Park in Congo in May and June, thus expanding the peace process’ major achievement: more security for millions of civilians in northern Uganda and southern Sudan. Yet both recent agreements are incomplete and devoid of specifics. Both parties’ commitment to a deal remains questionable. The international community needs to help the mediators by creating more leverage to push the peace process forward, including by presenting the LRA with a credible back-up military threat.

Recent developments create an opening to deal with core issues but have not altered the parties’ questionable desire to do so. The LRA is getting more from the process – food, money and security it can use to regroup and rebuild, and a chance to improve its image – than it is giving, and has reason to draw matters out. Many in the government and army are pursuing talks with less than full commitment. President Museveni appears to want to increase the chance for an eventual military solution by showing that he has exhausted all peaceful options. Khartoum seeks to keep its old ally Kony in play as a proxy should Sudan’s shaky Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) falter.

Pivotal negotiations on specific domestic reconciliation and accountability mechanisms are expected to start in October but the talks are currently in recess for consultations with local stakeholders. A planned one-month hiatus has extended to three months of delays and disputes. The Juba process is the best hope to end the twenty-year conflict in northern Uganda, and regional and wider international support for the mediation of the Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS) has been invaluable. Still, donors funding the talks must work together to keep the process moving forward. Negotiating the remaining details and implementation necessitate more leverage, focus and discipline.

DRC: Call to Address Sexual Violence

From IRIN

The international community must take urgent action to eliminate rampant sexual violence in war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Stephen Lewis, former UN special envoy for AIDS in Africa, has said.

"The contagion of sexual violence on the African continent is blood-chilling, and nowhere more so than in the eastern DRC," Lewis said at a press conference in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on 13 September. "Despite this, there seems to be unwillingness among the international community to take action."

He noted that while the world focused, understandably, on the crisis in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, eastern DRC - which has suffered 10 to 20 times more casualties than Darfur over the course of its decade-long war - had fallen off the agenda.

"Nowhere on this planet is such a holocaust of horror visited on women and girls," Lewis said.

In July, Yakin Erturk, special rapporteur of the UN Human Rights Council on Violence against Women, said an estimated 4,500 cases of rape had been reported in the eastern province of South Kivu in the first six months of 2007 alone, with many more going unreported. She noted that sexual violence was perceived as “normal” by local communities.

Lewis also criticised the Kinshasa-based government of President Joseph Kabila for having neither the "capacity nor the commitment" to deal with sexual violence in the east.

"Kinshasa has very little influence over the marauding gangs in the east," he said. "Sadly, the perpetrators of the violence are often men in uniform."

Lewis said “predictable” measures such as increased troop numbers and the involvement of the International Criminal Court were inadequate in the face of the scale of brutality in the DRC. He noted that a “dramatic departure” from traditional measures was necessary to tackle the problem head-on.

Darfur: President Bush's Olympic Mistake

An article by Eric Reeves in The New Republic

n international outcry over Beijing's hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games has grown steadily louder in recent months. How, it is being asked, can the premier event in international sports be hosted by a nation complicit in the most heinous international crimes? The Chinese regime is guilty of perpetrating the ongoing destruction of Tibet, supporting the vicious Myanmar junta, engaging in gross domestic human rights abuses, and, perhaps worst of all, facilitating genocide in Darfur.

Despite the controversy, President Bush announced last week that he will attend the Games. It's an unprecedented move--apparently no American president has ever attended an Olympic Games held abroad--and China's human rights violations make Bush's decision seem all the more unwarranted. But perhaps he'll be able to shield himself from criticism next summer by sharing a view of the Games with Steven Spielberg, who agreed in March to serve as an artistic consultant for the opening and closing ceremonies.

This is distressing because China has proven adept at generating political cover for its misdeeds. It recently received some excessively generous praise for not opposing U.N. Security Council Resolution 1769, passed on July 31, which authorizes a force of some 26,000 civilian police and troops to protect civilians and humanitarians in Darfur. But China was instrumental in badly weakening the resolution, leaving it without a mandate to disarm combatants, even those carrying weapons introduced into Darfur in violation of previous Security Council resolutions. As both Amnesty International and the U.N. Panel of Experts on Darfur have amply demonstrated, Khartoum continues to violate the weapons embargo on a massive scale. Further, China was also the key player in removing any threat of sanctions against Khartoum for obstructing deployment of the U.N.-authorized force.

China also drew praise for appointing a "special envoy" for Darfur. But Liu Guijin's first carefully orchestrated tour of the region in May was the occasion only for airbrushing its genocidal realities in subsequent public statements. "I didn't see a desperate scenario of people dying of hunger," Liu said at a media briefing. Rather, he said, people in Darfur thanked him for the Chinese government's help in building dams and providing water supply equipment. Beijing has yet to condemn Khartoum for its crimes, or call for a halt to the ongoing aerial bombardment of civilian targets, or offer public criticism of any of the regime's actions, including repeated obstruction and harassment of the world's largest humanitarian operation. By refusing to speak truthfully about Darfur, Beijing has convinced these brutal genocidaires that there will be no real international pressure on them to stop.

Now, Bush and Spielberg are contributing further to the whitewashing of China's record of abuse. Sophie Richardson, an Asia expert at Human Rights Watch, said that by attending the Olympics in Beijing Bush was giving "an enormous propaganda opportunity to an abusive government." Spielberg has declared publicly that, "all of us are dedicated to making these Olympic opening and closing ceremonies the most emotional anyone has ever seen." But what "emotions" does the director of "Schindler's List" associate with genocide in Darfur? When the brutal Janjaweed militias throw African children, screaming in terror, into bonfires as their parents watch, what emotions are evoked for Spielberg? When young girls are brutally gang-raped, what thoughts spring to mind? When malnutrition claims the lives of more and more Darfuri victims, what feelings should attend the spectacle of agony that is starvation? It's inconceivable that such negative images will be included in Spielberg's show.

Darfur: South Africa Pushing for Partial UN Deployment by October

From DPA

South Africa is using its seat on the United Nations Security Council to push for troops from a hybrid UN/African Union peacekeeping troops to be on the ground in the troubled Sudanese province of Darfur by next month.

South Africa would use its position at the UN to 'insist' on some troops from the force to be known as UNAMID being deployed by October, Ambassador George Nene, permanent representative to the office of the United Nations, said in Pretoria.

'As it can sometimes take anything between six and twelve months for a UN peacekeeping force to deploy... we are happy that there is already progress in the preparations for the deployment,' he said.

The UN has approved the deployment of a 26,000-strong peacekeeping force for Darfur, where a four-year-old conflict has claimed over 300,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people.

The so-called hybrid force, which will be composed mainly of African troops, is scheduled for deployment in the war-torn Sudanese region by the end of the year.

South Africa has yet to confirm how many troops it will be contributing to the mission. Around 600 South African troops are already deployed in Darfur as part of an 8,000-strong, underfunded AU force.

'South Africa has a positive attitude toward contributing troops to the hybrid force,' Nene said.

Darfur: Ban Alarmed by Deadly Air, Ground Attack

From the UN News Center

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today expressed deep concern at the Sudanese Government’s “brutal aerial and ground attack” on a South Darfur town that has left at least 25 civilians dead and took place just days after the United Nations chief visited the war-torn region.

Mr. Ban told the Security Council that the attack indicated that “we must all renew our strong appeals to the parties to show restraint in the lead-up to political negotiations in October” that are being held to try to resolve the conflict that has engulfed Darfur since 2003.

The African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) – which is operating in Darfur until the hybrid UN-AU peacekeeping force (UNAMID) takes over next year – reported that fierce fighting took place yesterday afternoon after an aerial and ground attack on Haskanita in South Darfur State.

In a closed-door briefing on his visit to Sudan, Chad and Libya, which ended at the weekend, Mr. Ban said the attack was an apparent retaliation for an attack by the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) on the Wad Banda military base on 29 August. JEM is one of the rebel groups that did not sign last year’s Darfur Peace Agreement with the Government.

More than 200,000 people have been killed and at least 2.2 million others have had to leave their homes because of the Darfur conflict between Government forces, allied Janjaweed militia and the rebel groups. An estimated 4 million Darfurians depend on humanitarian aid.

Mr. Ban said that although his trip to the region had brought “good progress,” particularly the announcement that political negotiations between the Government and rebels will take place in Libya on 27 October, “I will not say that we have had any successes yet.”

The Secretary-General said the UN is moving quickly to establish a trust fund to support the peace process and other assistance measures, and he told Council members that he will soon appeal to Member States to contribute to that fund.

“Now is the time to redouble our efforts, to move with even more speed to make good on commitments and the positive momentum we have generated so that we can finally, with the Sudanese people, see an end to the suffering and insecurity in Darfur.”

Uganda: LRA Lashes Out at United States

From VOA

Uganda's notorious Lord's Resistance Army is lashing out at a senior U.S. official who said Washington would support efforts to wipe out the rebels if peace talks aimed at ending their brutal insurgency collapse. Nick Wadhams has more from Nairobi.

Last week, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Frazer said peace talks in Juba, southern Sudan, were the rebel group's only option. She said she wants the talks that began last year wrapped up soon.

A Lord's Resistance Army spokesman, Godfrey Ayoo, says Frazer's remarks were not helpful. He says that if Uganda goes after Lord's Resistance Army troops now sheltering in eastern Congo, the region will see a return to full-scale war.

"Any attack on LRA positions will be a declaration of war, and it will be a call on the Lord's Resistance Army to fight its way back to Uganda and should this peace process break, then the Lord's Resistance Army will fight until it overthrows the government of the Ugandan dictatorship that knows nothing else but war-mongery and war," said Ayoo.

The rebel group has waged a 20-year war against Ugandan troops, and has become infamous for maiming its victims and kidnapping thousands of children who are forced to become sex slaves, fighter and porters.

Rebel troops have left their bases in south Sudan for eastern Congo, and there are fears their presence there, as well as violence between Congolese forces and a host of other militias, could spark a new regional war.

Uganda has demanded that the rebels disarm and return home from Congo. Otherwise, it is warning that it will push into Congo in a bid to wipe out the rebels.

Uganda's defense minister, Crispus Kiyonga, tells VOA he is still hopeful about the outcome of talks with the Lord's Resistance Army. He also warned the group that it stands no chance if it tries to overthrow President Yoweri Museveni's government.

"The government of Uganda remains fully committed to the peace process and talks in Juba, and it is our expectation that soon we should reach agreement with the LRA so that they can have a soft landing and return home," said Kiyonga. "The LRA is not in a position to overthrow the government of Uganda. We are talking so that our brothers and sisters come back home and have a soft landing."

As part of efforts to stabilize the region, the United States has organized a meeting on September 15 in Kampala, bringing together leaders from Uganda, Congo, Rwanda and Burundi to discuss the eastern Congo situation.

Uganda: Gov't Says LRA Should Have Left Congo

From Reuter

The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is violating the terms of a truce deal with Kampala by being in neighbouring Congo, Uganda's military said on Thursday after the rebels vowed to resume war in Uganda if attacked.

An agreement reached on Saturday between Uganda and neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) called for action to stamp out several militias plaguing eastern Congo, including the LRA, has infuriated the rebels.

The LRA, who fought a two-decade conflict in northern Uganda, said the agreement jeopardised peace talks under way with the Ugandan government and warned that any attack on them would be an invitation to war.

But Uganda's military spokesman, Major Felix Kulayigye, told Reuters that according to a cessation of hostilities deal reached at the peace talks, LRA fighters were meant to have left Congo months ago and assembled at Ri-Kwangba in southern Sudan.

"So they have no business worrying about the Arusha Agreement, which is about rebel groups in Congo," he said.

"If the LRA violates this truce we will hold it against them ... We are determined to defend the gains made in northern Uganda. We will not let that region slide back into insecurity."

Hopes for peace have been raised by more than a year of peace negotiations between LRA representatives and Ugandan officials in Juba, the capital of neighbouring south Sudan.

As calm returns to the north, Uganda's government began closing camps this week that once housed 1.7 million people uprooted by 20 years of fighting.

But the LRA, whose leaders are wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, was infuriated by the deal reached at the weekend in Arusha between Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni and his Congolese counterpart Joseph Kabila.

An LRA spokesman told a news conference in Nairobi that any attack on the group's military positions would be "strictly treated as a declaration of war, resumption of war and above all an invitation to bring war back to Uganda".

Chad/CAR: EU Agrees to Send Troops

From AFP

EU nations on Wednesday agreed to send troops to Chad and the Central African Republic to boost security when a joint UN-African Union force is deployed in neighbouring Darfur, a European diplomat said.

The 27 member states approved the scheme to send the force, the details of which are still to be hammered out, but the troops will not be deployed until there is UN Security Council resolution on the matter, he added.

The European mission, with its headquarters in France, was agreed in response to a UN call and is expected to comprise a maximum of 4,000 soldiers deployed for 12 months.

They would not in case turn up until after the end of the rainy season in mid-October.

When there the force will provide security for 300 UN police officers, protect civilians and help with humanitarian initiatives.

In July EU foreign ministers gave the green light for preparation for the mission, which they said "should be based on a resolution by the UN Security Council, with a clearly defined exit strategy."

They added then that it "should be conducted in full cooperation with the UN and the AU, and in consultation with the authorities of the countries concerned".

In Darfur, the breakaway province of Sudan, at least 200,000 people have died from the combined effect of war and famine since civil strife started in February 2003, according to UN estimates.

Other sources give a much higher toll but Khartoum disputes the figures.

Sudan and Chad accuse each other of supporting rebel forces in their respective territories.

The United Nations has estimated that there are 236,000 refugees and 173,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Chad, with daunting logistical problems for humanitarian workers.

In CAR, the number of IDPs exceeds 200,000, according to aid groups, largely due to persistent insecurity in the north of the country where government troops are battling several rebel groups.

A 26,000-strong joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force to Darfur was approved by the UN Security Council in July.

On Monday UN chief Ban Ki-moon said the UN had received "more contributions than we may actually need" for the force except in specialized areas such as air transportation.

Darfur: Sudan Escalating Attacks Before Talks

From Reuters

A senior Darfur rebel leader accused the Sudanese government on Wednesday of trying to grab land ahead of October peace talks, and threatened to pull out of the talks unless attacks stopped.

Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) leader Khalil Ibrahim said the violence in the remote west would make it impossible for him to travel to negotiations with Khartoum, due to take place in Libya on Oct. 27.

"The government is escalating its attacks. There are daily attacks," he said. "They are killing civilians and animals and there are displaced people. They are trying to take as much land as possible before the peace talks and the arrival of peacekeeping troops."

A JEM field commander said government aircraft had bombed villages close to a rebel-held town in north Darfur on Tuesday, killing six civilians. A Sudanese army spokesman denied the army was escalating attacks and accused rebels of starting the fighting in Haskanita by ambushing government forces.

Ibrahim said if fighting persists it will be "impossible for us to go" to the talks, adding: "There is a war going on and we would have to fight for our survival."

He said he was calling on the United Nations to step up its pressure on the Sudanese government to stop attacks in Darfur.

Khartoum signed a joint statement with the United Nations last week agreeing to end violence in Darfur, prepare for peace talks with rebel leaders in Libya, and help in the deployment of 26,000 U.N. and African Union peacekeepers in Darfur.

The reports of fresh violence on Tuesday came on the heels of fighting in Haskanita that involved the use of heavy weapons including helicopter gunships on Monday.

JEM field commander Abdel Aziz el-Nur Ashr said six civilians were killed on Tuesday in bombing raids on villages near Haskanita, and a JEM statement asked aid groups to help bury 500 to 600 government soldiers it said were killed in a failed ground attack on Haskanita after an aerial bombardment.

The Sudanese army spokesman dismissed the rebel report on army casualties as an exaggeration, and blamed the rebels for the violence. He said the army had been ambushed and was then forced to call in air support as backup.

"It was a hostile action by the rebels," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "There were casualties on both sides. The situation remains unstable."

Reports from rebel groups of the numbers of casualties and prisoners taken during that fighting have varied widely.

Meanwhile, ailing senior Darfur rebel figure Suleiman Jamous, the Sudan Liberation Movement's humanitarian coordinator, said he had finally received a passport and exit visa and would leave the country for medical care as soon as the United Nations could arrange a flight.

Darfur: Success Uncertain for New, U.N.-Sponsored Peace Talks

From the AP

The United Nations and many African countries think the time is ripe to push Darfur's rebel groups to reach a peace deal with Sudan's government, and end four years of bloody conflict once and for all.

Both sides have reached a military stalemate, and months of intense international pressure have finally forced Khartoum to allow a new 26,000-strong joint U.N. and African Union peacekeeping force into Darfur.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon says new peace talks, set to start Oct. 27 in Libya, must be "a final settlement of this issue" — Darfur's bloodletting has killed more than 200,000 people and uprooted 2.5 million Darfurians from their homes.

But Darfur has a history of peace talks — their sheer numbers a testimony to their lack of success. And there are many obstacles in the way of ensuring a new set will bring lasting peace.

Since fighting began in 2003 between ethnic African rebels and the Arab-dominated Sudanese government, there have been over half a dozen cease-fires or peace deals of various formats — all quickly breached by both sides.

The latest violation came just Monday, when government air force and troops raided a rebel-controlled town, killing at least a dozen people and ignoring a United Nations ban on military flights over Darfur.

Khartoum has claimed that operations such a Monday's are provoked by attacks by rebel groups which rejected the latest peace deal, signed in 2006 in Abuja, Nigeria, by the Sudanese government and a branch of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army.

The holdout factions are precisely the ones the U.N. and the African Union want to bring to the new negotiations.

Abdellaziz Ushar, a rebel commander from the Justice Equality Movement — one of the rebel holdouts — said Monday's attack proved the "government is not willing to hold real peace talks."

Speaking from the raided town of Haskanita, Ushar said a senior U.N. mediator visited his camp to talk about the new peace negotiations just 48 hours before government gunships dropped bombs on him.

The Sudanese army denied the offensive.

The JEM rebels said the attack "clearly targeted" their leader, Khalil Ibrahim, who said he would attend the Libya talks with the intention of signing a new peace deal. However, Ibrahim also said his group would continue to fight during the negotiations because cease-fires during previous talks had proved ineffective.

Abdel Wahid Elnur, another main holdout rebel chief, has vowed not to attend the talks until the U.N.-AU peacekeepers are fully deployed in Darfur because, he says, the government can't be trusted otherwise.

This could be a big stumbling point, since Elnur is viewed as having the largest following among Darfur refugees and the U.N. wants the civilians to be heard at the talks too. There are also fears that the Paris-based Elnur may be unable to rein in bickering field commanders from his SLA faction.

"I'd strongly advise Abdel Wahid to join, or he'll loose his last chance to have an input in the negotiations," said Rodolphe Adada, head of the new U.N.-AU peacekeeping mission.

The joint force, approved by the Security Council on July 31, will likely start deploying in October, just as the Libya talks begin.

Fragmentation of rebel groups has been the Darfur movements' main weakness, and Ibrahim of JEM warned he would pull out of the Libya talks if the half-dozen factions linked to Elnur fail to speak with one voice.

The rival SLA movement of Minni Minawi — the only rebel chief who signed the Abuja deal — welcomed the new talks. However, the U.N. says Minawi's fighters have increasingly clashed with other Darfur factions.

As host, Libya could be key to getting the disparate groups together. It is believed to hold leverage over several Darfur rebel leaders and has hosted them in the past. Long-ostracized Tripoli is also eager to project an image of regional peacemaker.

Still, the main question remains what to negotiate on.

Rebels say they took up arms against Khartoum to end decades of unfair treatment and government discrimination against ethnic Africans. None have demanded Darfur's independence, but have called for stronger regional role and better financial compensations for war victims.

Sudan's Minister of State for foreign affairs, Al Sammani Al Wasila, said Monday that Khartoum was willing to negotiate those points.

Another key rebel demand is that Khartoum disarm the janjaweed militia — the government-armed fighters from Darfur Arab nomad tribes blamed for most of the atrocities against civilians.

Most of these issues were already central to the Abuja deal and a senior mediator warned the rebels against expecting more Khartoum concessions. The mediator, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the talks, anticipated the new negotiations will focus on enforcing the existing Abuja deal.

Still, by reducing the violence, the U.N.-AU peacekeepers could help reach a political settlement, said Adada, the U.N.-AU mission chief.

"The most difficult problem will be the good faith of all parties in Darfur," Adada said.

Darfur: Natsios Criticized Over Comments

From the Sudan Tribune

The Save Darfur coalition said today that they have no intention of easing their campaign aimed at pressuring world governments to end the Darfur crisis.

Larry Rossin, a board member of the Save Darfur Coalition and a former U.N. official told Sudan Tribune that “pressure by civil society is just as important as diplomatic pressure by officials such as Natsios in bringing peace to Darfur”.

Rossin was responding to statements made by the US presidential envoy to Sudan Andrew Natsios to the Boston Herald in which he said that efforts by Darfur activists such as Save Darfur coalition were “more useful eight to 12 months ago” but are now outdated.

Natsios also suggested that the campaign by Darfur activists saying it may hurt behind the scenes diplomatic efforts that are finally bearing fruit.

However Rossin said he is not sure how work by Save Darfur coalition could have a negative impact on diplomatic efforts underway.

“If we were to lift pressure many parties may lose interest in the Darfur crisis as a result of fading world attention” he added.

Eric Reeves, an American academic and long time expert on Sudan condemned Natsios’s remarks in unusually strong terms describing him as “an arrogant fool, evidently intent on blaming advocacy groups for the failure of the Bush administration to make policy sense of its genocide determination”.

“It is not the advocates that are making peace more difficult: it’s the attitude of appeasement and accommodation represented by Natsios that is the real obstacle to peace." he added.

Darfur: NGO Stages Olympics Campaign to Help End Genocide

From VOA

With China in an unrivaled position to influence Sudan to facilitate an end to the genocide campaign in Darfur, various groups are posing challenges for Beijing to boost its prestige as the host of next summer’s Olympic games. The newly formed Olympic Dream for Darfur campaign questions how China can uphold its international image as Olympics host, while extending political cover and economic support to help Sudan finance militia attacks against thousands of its own citizens. To get China to sway Khartoum to end the violence, the group’s director Jill Savitt says that engagement – not an Olympics boycott - is the right approach.

“We’re saying to China, ‘You have this unique relationship. You have protected Khartoum up until now, watering down, blocking, vetoing every resolution. You can’t keep doing that and host the Olympics’,” she said.

Allied since the 1990’s, Sudan and China trade heavily, with Khartoum selling two-thirds of its petroleum exports to Beijing. Their commercial ties are a prime example of China’s bid to increase investments and gain political influence in African countries. China also sells arms to Sudan and as such is seen as having an ability to influence the Bashir government’s conduct of the Darfur conflict, in which more than 200-thousand civilians have been killed and more than two million villagers have been uprooted from their homes since 2003. With next year’s Beijing games focusing world attention on the host country’s prestige, Jill Savitt says she hopes China will work to change Sudan’s behavior to avert challenges from foreign visitors and critics of the Darfur genocide.

“We would hope that there is not a genocide going on a year from now still. If there is still violence and people are unable to leave the camps where the refugees are, and the camps are not improved, China is going to be concerned about what all of the reporters covering the Olympics are saying. There are athletes, former Olympians, current professional athletes, current Olympians, who care about Darfur and who will very respectfully raise the issue when they’re in Beijing. There are people buying tickets as spectators who care about Darfur. We are considering pairing up people from the Darfur region of Sudan who live in exile and buying tickets for them to go to the Olympics to raise these issues,” Savitt points out.

Although several activist groups have credited a so-called “Genocide Olympics” campaign with influencing China’s recent UN Security Council vote to approve forming a hybrid UN – African Union (AU) peacekeeping force of 26-thousand troops for Darfur, Savitt argues that the Olympic Dream for Darfur campaign does not believe that a 2008 Olympics boycott would be effective.

“I have not heard of any non-profit organizations calling for a boycott of the Olympics about the Darfur issue. There were some presidential candidates in France. There are some people in the US Congress who have talked about the issue. But there’s no movement of anyone calling for a boycott. And that’s for a very specific reason. As the Olympics near, the world’s attention is going to be on Beijing about the ideals of the Olympics, and we want to tap into that attention and throw it over to the forgotten people of Darfur,” she said.

Since the group’s formation four months ago, Olympic Dream for Darfur backers have organized their own torch lighting relay events to carry the Olympic spirit and a message of ending the violence in Darfur all the way to China. Actress and UN Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow launched the torch relay last month from western Sudan at the Darfur-Chad border. Jill Savitt says torch has passed through Rwanda, which experienced its own genocide thirteen years ago. It will also travel to Armenia, Bosnia, Berlin, Auschwitz, and Cambodia before arriving in Hong Kong in December.

“There are miles to go before there is security in Darfur,” says Savitt. “One of the good points now is that leaders are paying attention to the issue. On the down side, there is this notion that talking about the problem somehow addresses it – that trying is good enough. Well, trying is not good enough. We have one thing that must happen for us to stop our campaign, and that is adequate and verifiable security on the ground in Darfur. It should happen. If the United Nations, including China, want to see that happen, we should be able to, as an international community, intervene in the fifth year of a genocide.”

Uganda/DRC: LRA Say Attack Would Invite War

From Reuters

Any attack on Ugandan rebels based in eastern Congo will be an invitation for the group to resume its war in northern Uganda, the fugitive Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) said on Wednesday.

The LRA, whose leaders are wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, terrorised the north for 20 years. But they are now based in northeastern Congo and their representatives are in peace talks with the government.

On Tuesday, Uganda began closing camps for the 1.7 million people uprooted by the conflict. But an agreement this week between Uganda and Congo to stamp out militias plaguing eastern Congo, including the LRA, has infuriated the rebels.

"Any attack on our military positions ... shall be strictly treated as a declaration of war, resumption of war and above all an invitation to bring war back to Uganda," LRA spokesman Godfrey Ayoo told a news conference in Nairobi.

He said Saturday's deal between Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and his Congolese counterpart Joseph Kabila, which calls for action against the rebels within 90 days, violated the spirit of the ongoing peace talks in Juba, southern Sudan.

Ugandan government and military officials were not immediately available to comment, but in recent months they have questioned the LRA's military capacity to resume hostilities.

Under the deal between Museveni and Kabila, whose relations have often been fraught, the two countries will also review their borders and open embassies to boost diplomatic ties.

DRC: Averting the Nightmare Scenario

A new report from ENOUGH

Between 1996 and 2002, the two massive wars fought in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were arguably the world's deadliest since World War II. With almost no international fanfare, Congo is on the brink of its third major war in the last decade, and almost nothing is being done to stop it.

A dissident Congolese Tutsi General named Laurent Nkunda and at least 3,000 loyal forces have carved out control of parts of North Kivu Province. The Congolese government has responded by realigning itself with the FDLR -- a militia composed of more than 6,000 Rwandan Hutu rebels, many with links to the 1994 genocide in their home country -- to fight Nkunda's more effective force.

Fighting between the two sides has intensified in recent weeks. Troops are being deployed to the front line and more are being forcibly recruited, and the potential for Rwanda to be drawn back into Congo -- as it was in the two previous wars -- increases with each day the international community drags its feet.

War in the Great Lakes region has been in a state of suspension over the last few years, despite the Congolese peace deal, and it ominously appears that the conflict has not yet reached its conclusion. Despite a complex peace deal and successful Congolese elections in late 2006, Congo will head down the road to a third cataclysm if the international community does not take much more robust action.

Darfur: China Defends Role

From DPA

China's top diplomat on African affairs said Tuesday his country and the United States are still at odds on ways to resolve the ethnic conflict in the western Sudanese region of Darfur. "The US government appreciates the Chinese stances on the Darfur settlement and has made appropriate remarks, but on specific issues, there remain some differences, particularly in deciding priorities" to tackle the conflict, said Chinese Ambassador Liu Guijin at UN headquarters in New York.

Liu said cooperation and communication at government levels remain "very good" between the two countries until they get down to what he called specific issues. But he did not elaborate during a press conference to discuss China's role in Sudan.

China has been criticized for not using its clout on the Sudanese government to stop the ethnic killing in Darfur. China does not agree with the death toll in Darfur, which has been estimated at more than 300,000 dead since 2003.

But Liu said China was singled out in Sudan where many European and Asian countries have larger economic stakes than China. He said French and British oil companies have larger investments, but have escaped media scrutiny.

Liu visited Washington last week before New York and he said US Congress representatives he talked to still harboured "some misunderstandings" about China's role in Sudan. But he said those US legislators acknowledged China's "unique" role in Darfur.

"They hope that China can do a little more to end the conflict in Darfur," Liu said, adding that some US non-governmental organizations (NGOs) involved in relief work in Sudan also voiced similar demands, using the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 as backdrop to pressure China to end the Darfur conflict.

"They do not want to boycott the Olympics, they just want to use it to pressure China," Liu said.

"The Olympics and Darfur are two totally different issues," Liu said. "We strongly oppose the linkage and we are not afraid to do so."

Liu spent two days at UN headquarters to discuss China's participation in UN peacekeeping operations in Sudan and other African nations, but also to try to change the perception of his country's involvement in places where conflicts have resulted in high civilian casualties.

"China's oil exploration in Sudan does not mean that we support the killing of people in Sudan," Liu said. "I hope anybody with objective judgement can see it."

Sudan: Police Raid Junior Ruling Party Offices

From Reuters

Heavily armed police raided premises of Sudan's junior coalition government partner on Tuesday, threatening a partnership created under a peace deal that ended 20 years of north-south war, the party said.

The Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) said the raids, which targeted three of its offices in the capital, followed a campaign and slanderous attacks against senior SPLM officials in the national media.

"We are really fed up of what's going on," Yassir Arman, deputy secretary general of the SPLM, told Reuters.

The interior ministry was not immediately available for comment.

The SPLM signed a peace agreement with the northern National Congress Party (NCP) in 2005, ending more than two decades of north-south conflict that left some two million people dead and forced four million to flee from their homes.

It resulted in the SPLM joining the government.

SPLM sources said that heavily armed police and security forces, backed by armored personnel carriers, stormed their offices in Khartoum North, Dem, and Mogran, vandalising property, and in one case, breaking down a door.

One source said a portrait of the founder of SPLM leader John Garang, who died in a helicopter crash two years ago, was also destroyed.

"It is uncalled for. It is going to impact negatively on the relationship between the National Congress and the SPLM," said Arman. The SPLM said the police searched the offices.

Arman said as an important member of the ruling coalition, the SPLM leadership should have at least been informed if there was a legitimate reason to search the party's offices.

"Obviously out of courtesy they were supposed to inform the leadership of the SPLM and we were supposed to be there," he said. "But they came and searched us like criminals. That is unfortunate," the SPLM deputy secretary general said.

The incident came just three days after rumors about the death of Salva Kiir, the leader of the SPLM and president of the semi-autonomous government, which created tensions in Khartoum that only eased after Kiir appeared on state television to dispel the reports.

Darfur: AU Deeply Concerned About Fighting

From AFP

The African Union Mission in Sudan said on Tuesday it was deeply concerned about recent fighting between government troops and rebels in the troubled region of Darfur.

AMIS said it had received "extremely grave reports" about fighting on Monday in the town of Haskanita in Darfur between government forces and rebels that did not sign a 2006 peace deal with Khartoum.

"AMIS is deeply concerned about this fighting and calls for an immediate ceasefire by all parties," it said in a statement.

"Given the critical stage of the peace process, the forthcoming negotiations in Libya and the commitments made by all parties to uphold the ceasefire, the nature, scale and timing of these attacks is astonishing."

The peacekeeping body said that while exact details of the attack remained vague, "the evidence that fighting indeed took place involving the use of heavy weapons including helicopter gunships is clear."

Two rebel groups, one faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) as well as the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) said they had managed to repel Monday's attack, which a military spokesman in Khartoum denies took place.

The spokesman said his forces were defending themselves against a rebel ambush.

Reports of the attack come days after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced that peace talks between the Sudanese government and the Darfur rebel factions are set to resume in Libya on October 27.

Darfur: Violence Threatens Peace Talks

From Reuters

Ongoing violence in Sudan's Darfur region threatens to undermine planned peace talks between Khartoum and rebel groups, a British minister said as he flew into the war-torn area on Tuesday.

British Foreign Office Minister for Africa Mark Malloch Brown made the remarks a day after rebels said government aircraft had bombed a rebel-held Darfur town. A Sudanese army spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Malloch Brown, on a day-long trip to Darfur, told Reuters: "Ongoing volatility on the ground could undermine peace talks. My message is that the government should try to stop all offensive action and the rebels should do the same."

Khartoum signed a joint communique with the United Nations last week that included pledges to cease hostilities in Darfur, prepare for the arrival of a 26,000-strong joint U.N./African Union peacekeeping mission, and to lay the foundations for peace talks in Libya on Oct. 27.

"At the moment, we are pushing a constructive diplomatic engagement trying to get everyone to the talks. If that approach fails, then we'll come down hard on whatever side is responsible for that, whether that is the rebels or the government," Malloch Brown said.

He said that sanctions were "in reserve", and that measures taken against rebel groups could include a reduction in the support offered them in foreign countries.

International experts estimate some 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million displaced in over four years of violence in Darfur, which Washington calls genocide.

Khartoum denies genocide and says the Western media overplay the conflict. The International Criminal Court is investigating war crimes allegations in the region.

Darfur rebel groups the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army's Unity (SLA-Unity) faction said government helicopters and Antonov aircraft had attacked their positions in the town of Haskanita on Monday. The rebels say they repelled a ground assault that followed the bombardment.

A spokesman for the African Union, which has a small force of peacekeepers in Haskanita, has confirmed receiving reports of fighting in the town, although details still had to be checked by officers.

Earlier this year U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on Khartoum to stop its bombing campaign in Darfur, saying the air attacks violated a U.N. Security Council resolution.

Abu-Bakr Mohammed Kadu, an SLA-Unity field commander, said his forces had taken 10 government soldiers prisoner during the attack on Haskanita. "We call on the International Committee of the Red Cross to come. We want to hand the POWs over to them."

Abdel Aziz el-Nur Ashr from JEM said the attack had not affected the group's determination to attend the peace talks but added the incident raised questions over Khartoum's commitment.

International observers who did not want to be named said it was likely the attack was in retaliation for a joint JEM/SLA-Unity assault on a government base east of Haskanita in Sudan's Kordofan region at the end of August.

The rebel attack on a government base in the town of Wad Banda, 200 km (125 miles) east of Haskanita, killed 41 people last month. The Justice Ministry has launched an inquiry into six JEM members it suspects masterminded that attack

Darfur: Anatomy of a Start-Up Antigenocide Charity

A profile of the Genocide Intervention Network in The Christian Science Monitor - thanks to POTP

There's disagreement about how often Mark Hanis wore the powder-blue United Nations peacekeeping beret around campus.

It may have happened, he concedes. But only once or twice.

His colleague and erstwhile Swarthmore College classmate Sam Bell argues differently. Mr. Bell knew about Mr. Hanis – about that hat, really – before the two met. "He'd be riding his bicycle around campus with his peacekeeping beret," Bell says. "Not, like, on Halloween. Like it's part of the common American wardrobe."

Hanis isn't prone to fashion statements – he went seven years until his first new suit, bought in a three-for-one deal at an outlet store – but peacekeeping has taken over his life. He's the 25-year-old executive director of an antigenocide organization he never expected to found. "At every step, we thought we would hand it off to experts or other people who must be doing this already. But every time, there wasn't someone there to pick up the ball," Hanis says. "So we just kept doing it."

Now, his job is to make a permanent fixture inside the Beltway out of a grass-roots group that wants to end genocide. It's too early to know whether he'll succeed in the long haul, but Hanis has shepherded his group through a nonprofit's shakiest years, with a mission most people said was impossible.

In the fall of his senior year, when the first African Union soldiers arrived in Sudan's Darfur to protect civilians fleeing violence, Hanis read that they traveled from aid group to aid group, hats in hand, asking for help to buy boots. Appalled, he started the Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net) to raise money for the soldiers – something like the notion of holding a bake sale for NATO.

Hanis promised donors that their money would help the good guys (the African Union soldiers) protect the innocent from the bad guys (the janjaweed militias, allied to the Sudanese government, who burned homes and killed villagers). This moral discernment makes GI-Net different from traditional humanitarian organizations, which feed and clothe people caught up in conflict, without judging any side as wrong. Hanis thinks that misses the point in cases like Darfur, which the US has labeled genocide. "Genocide is not a humanitarian crisis," he says. "You can't throw rice at gunships bombing villages."

Many told Hanis his idea was naive. But in just four months, he'd raised a quarter of a million dollars. This was in the spring of 2005, before Darfur became a cause du jour – before George Clooney and Mia Farrow, before Panties for Peace or Timberland boots with "Stomp Out Genocide" soles. This was before Hanis himself imagined his idea going national, with 10,000 members and a $3 million budget.

His first challenge: If you have $250,000 to spend on an army, what do you buy?

Darfur: Rebels Accuse Government of Bombing/Rebels Down Two Choppers

From IRIN

Darfur rebels have accused Sudanese government forces of bombing Haskanita, a rebel-held town in North Darfur, just days after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Khartoum had agreed to end attacks in the region.

Abu Bakr Kado, a commander with a faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM–Unity), said government forces launched an air and ground assault on the town on 10 September, without giving details of casualties.

"The bombing was intense," said Kado, adding that government forces used high-altitude Antonov bombers and helicopter gunships. He said the bombing coincided with a ground assault by hundreds of soldiers.

Forces from his faction and another rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), repulsed the attack, according to Kado.

"Some government soldiers fled to the African Union (AU) base in Haskanita, but we captured 10, including a brigadier," he said.

The army was not immediately available for comment. Kado said his group was prepared to release the captured soldiers as a goodwill gesture. "We want to hand them over to the International Committee of the Red Cross," he said.

Haskanita is near the central Sudanese region of Kordofan.

Last month, the Sudanese government accused rebels from the SLM–Unity and JEM of killing 41 people in an attack on a base of Central Reserve Forces – a branch of the police – in Wad Banda in North Kordofan.

It was not immediately clear if the attack on Haskanita was retaliatory.

A Sudanese presidential adviser, Ghazi Salah Eddin, told reporters on 10 September that the "army will not stand idle" in the face of attacks by rebels opposed to peace.

The renewed violence in Darfur came just days after the Sudanese government agreed to fulfil "its commitment to a full cessation of hostilities in Darfur, and agreed-upon ceasefire".

Sudan made the pledge in a joint communiqué with the UN at the end of Ban's visit.

Before leaving Khartoum, Ban announced that peace talks between the Sudanese government and Darfur rebel groups would open on 27 October in Libya under the auspices of the UN and AU.

He further urged all the parties to refrain from any action that could torpedo efforts to end more than four-and-a-half years of conflict in Darfur, which has claimed 200,000 lives and forced more than two million to flee their homes.

The Sudanese government promised to "contribute positively to a secure environment for the negotiations".

The rebels said they were equally committed, but warned that attacks by government forces on their position raised questions about Khartoum's commitment to peace.

"We are committed to the ceasefire agreement signed in N'djamena, Chad, in 2004," said Kado. He, however, added that the Haskanita attack could have a "negative impact" on the peace process.

Most rebel groups have agreed to participate in peace talks with the government, but one key rebel leader, Abdul Wahid Mohammed Nur, founder of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), has set conditions before taking part.

A high-level delegation from the former southern rebel group, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), arrived in Paris, where Nur lives, on 10 September to persuade him to join the talks.

The SPLM, which administers Southern Sudan, formed a government of national unity with Khartoum in 2005 after both parties signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended more than two decades of a north-south conflict.

From the Sudan Tribune

Sudanese military aircraft bombed a rebel-held town in north Darfur on Monday, insurgent groups said, they also claimed to have repelled a ground attack and brought down two helicopters.

The raid on the small town of Haskanita in northern Darfur started at about 9 a.m. local time with heavy bombardments by Sudanese army planes and helicopter gunships, rebel reports said. Haskanita is held by a joint rebel force from Justice and Equality Movement and (JEM) Sudan Liberation Army – Unity faction

The two rebel groups said in a joint press release that “two helicopter fighters were shot down and over 70 military vehicles (..) were totally destroyed. They also captured 25 vehicles captured in useable from.

The rebel groups claimed they crushed the government troops, and captured the commander of the Sudanese army force, Brigadier General Kamal Aldin Abdalla Adam Abdel Mumin, Batch 30, Military No 5608, besides other government soldiers.

Reports of the attack came days after the visit of the UN Secretary General to Sudan and seven weeks before peace talks between Khartoum and rebel groups in Tripoli. It also coincided with renewed calls from the African Union and the United Nations for the two sides to cease hostilities and prepare for the arrival of a 26,000-strong force of U.N./African Union peacekeepers.

Air raids on Darfur are banned by the United Nations and in breach of several ceasefire agreements. Despite frequent accusations by the international community, Sudan’s military regularly denies it conducts air strikes, as was the case Monday.

An AU officer stationed in Haskanita confirmed to the Associated Press there had been full-fledged combat all day. The officer said the AU forces heard air bombardments and near constant gun battles. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

"I don’t know how many casualties there are, but the town took a strong hit," the officer said.

He said AU peacekeepers did not intervene because they have been confined to their small compound in Haskanita since June due to violence in the area.

The Sudanese army denied it had launched any offensive on the town.

"This news is unfounded, we cannot confirm that there is any operation going on in the area," the military spokesman’s office said in a telephone interview.

It was not clear whether the attack was in retaliation for a raid by the SLA-Unity and JEM on a government base in southern Kordofan at the end of the last August. However the rebels alleged that this attack targeted the leader of the rebel JEM, Khalil Ibrahim who met a AU-UN delegation 48 hours prior to the assault.

Darfur: Natsios Says Crisis Solvable/Natsios Says Save Darfur Efforts May Be Outdated

Two article, both via POTP

From the Worcester Telegram & Gazette News

It was a year ago this month that President Bush appointed former Massachusetts Republican Party Chairman Andrew S. Natsios as a special envoy to the African nation of Sudan. In that time, his thoughts about the assignment have undergone a radical shift.

He first believed the political situation surrounding the genocide in Darfur was unmanageable. He now thinks the disparate social and political factors that contributed to the slaughter of 200,000 to 400,000 people and the displacement of 2.5 million others is solvable.

To that end, he credits the actions taken by individuals and local groups across the country working with the Save Darfur Coalition as having played an important role in elevating the issue to its present status.

“I don’t minimize it at all,” he said in a recent interview with the Telegram & Gazette.

Mr. Natsios, the former director of the United States Agency for International Development and former chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, said he is looking ahead to peace talks between the Arab-dominated Sudanese government and the African Darfur rebel leaders that will begin Oct. 27 in Tripoli, Libya’s capital.

“Until six weeks ago I did not see things moving in the right direction,” Mr. Natsios said. But now he believes an agreement to end the violence could be in place within 10 months or “hopefully by the end of the year.” The situation “is evolving, mutating, however you want to put it,” he said.

The United Nations resolution calling for 24,000 troops, including 7,000 African troops already in Darfur, was a critical factor in changing the nature of the situation, he said.

“There’s a positive momentum going and the United States’ strategy is to accelerate the momentum and try to get out of the way those groups which are becoming obstructionist,” he said. “The United States has a tendency — our advocacy groups, our culture, our government sometimes — to see things in black and white terms. Everybody wants to know who the good guys are and the bad guys are. Well, there are not many good guys in Darfur.”

Government militias were responsible for the genocide by burning down 2,000 villages and displacing the people. And yet the genocide has been officially denied by Sudan’s leaders, who say the death tolls have been massively overestimated.

But several rebel groups have become obstructionist. Mr. Natsios said they need to unify in order for peace talks to be successful.

Democrats have called for a no-fly zone over Sudan and have pushed divestment as a strategy to force China, with its major oil interests in the country, to force a solution to the killing in the Darfur region.

Mr. Natsios, a one-time state representative from Holliston, said he can understand the logic behind divestment, and noted that as a Massachusetts legislator he supported divestment as a tool to help end apartheid in South Africa. But divestment is a clumsy instrument that created laws that remain in effect and inhibit U.S. trade with South Africa to this day, he said.

“What they say is, ‘You’re doing everything that we say but you’re killing us with divestment.’ What do I say to them?” he said. “The administration has a problem with divestiture as a general proposition. We do not think that the capital markets should be politicized. The proposal to do divestment can be as powerful as divestment itself.”

Several states have already passed divestment legislation aimed at Sudan. A Massachusetts bill would allow the state to opt-out of divestment of a particular company if it turns out that divestment has a negative impact on investment returns. Bill supporters say about two-tenths of 1 percent of the state’s pension fund is invested in companies that do business in Sudan.

U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern, D-Worcester, has been one of the louder voices in Congress on the Darfur genocide, going so far as to get himself arrested in front of the Sudan embassy, along with U.S. Rep. John W. Olver, D-Amherst, to bring attention to the issue.

The story behind the genocide is complicated and some of the players have switched sides in order to get a better deal, Mr. Natsios said, recalling a conversation with a government-sponsored Janjaweed militia man who went over to the rebel side. Even the ethnic-cleansing nature of the genocide has changed. Mr. Natsios said the 200,000 people displaced this year were mostly Arabs.

And China presents a problem all its own because its culture is so different from that of the Western world. “The Chinese do not like conducting diplomacy in public,” Mr. Natsios said. “We use sticks and they use carrots.” Mr. Natsios said the Chinese may well be motivated by the desire to avoid a boycott as it plays host to the 2008 Summer Olympics. “I think some of the criticism of China has been unfair.”

Mr. Natsios is afraid Sudan is headed in the wrong direction, but remains optimistic nonetheless. Plans are in place to have multiparty parliamentary and presidential elections by 2009, events that would transform Sudan to a Democratic nation.

Change, unfortunately, has to be slow in order to accommodate all sides in this conflict, he said.

“Critics can’t have it both ways,” he said. “A lot of people who are critics of the administration say we need to do things multilaterally, we need to do them through the U.N., we need to work with our allies. You hear that over and over again with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan and the Palestinian issue. When you do that, things slow down. People see things differently, you have to negotiate everything.”

From the Boston Herald

Activist groups trying to force mutual-fund companies - including Boston’s Fidelity Investments - to divest from firms with ties to the Sudanese government may be disrupting sensitive talks under way to bring peace to the war-torn country, says President Bush’s special envoy to Sudan.

Andrew Natsios, Bush’s envoy and a veteran political player in Massachusetts, praised groups such as the Save Darfur Coalition for being “well intentioned” and helping to “publicize” the suffering of millions of people in Sudan’s southern region of Darfur.

Darfur has been racked for years by war and what many call open genocide by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government against the region’s black African population.

But Natsios, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and ex-chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, said activists’ efforts were “more useful eight to 12 months ago” but are perhaps outdated today. The Sudanese government has “very reluctantly” agreed to allow more United Nations peace-keeping troops in Darfur, following massive international pressure on the leaders in Khartoum, Natsios said.

“Some of the advocacy groups want to inflict pain for pain’s sake” against the government in Sudan, Natsios said late last week in an interview with the Herald.

He suggested calls to pressure mutual-fund companies, including efforts to push Fidelity into divesting from PetroChina, could disrupt ongoing delicate talks that are finally starting to work. China, considered a supporter of the Khartoum government, has been active in recent talks, he noted.

He added the Bush administration also opposes the divestment campaign because it “politicizes financial markets.”

But local activists say they have every intention of pressing ahead with their divestment efforts.

“We’re independent activists,” said Eric Cohen, chairman of the Boston-based Investors Against Genocide, a member of the Save Darfur Coalition.

Cohen’s group, previously known as Fidelity Out of Sudan, has waged a media campaign against the Boston mutual-fund giant for its investments in PetroChina. Though Fidelity has reduced some of its PetroChina holdings, it still owns company shares, infuriating activists.

Last week, the Save Darfur Coalition and Investors Against Genocide expanded the divestment campaign to three other fund companies, including Vanguard, to protest their investment practices.

Cohen said he respected what Natsios is doing in Sudan.

But he said diplomats often don’t like groups meddling during tense negotiations, even though privately they view activists’ efforts as useful pressure points on governments.

“It’s a good-cop/bad-cop situation,” he said, adding groups are actually “helping strengthen the hand” of negotiators.

Darfur: Steidle, Wolf Urge Divestment

From Leesburg Today

The Tally Ho theatre was packed for the screening of The Devil Came On Horseback Friday evening. Star of the film Brian Steidle, producer and Steidle's sister, Gretchen Steidle Wallace and congressman Frank R. Wolf (R-VA-10) were in attendance as lights darkened on the full house of interested locals.

The hour-and-a-half-long documentary based on Steidle's book of the same name could not be categorized as light, Friday evening movie fare. The scenes depicted were horrific, brutal, saddening, infuriating-emotions compounded by the shocking information disseminated through the film. Nary a sound was heard in the movie hall as time passed and viewers attempted to process what they were seeing and hearing.

After the film Wallace began the question-and-answer session by first introducing congressman Wolf and next her brother, who descended the aisle amid a standing ovation. It was clear already the film had made quite an impact on its viewers.

For about 30 to 40 minutes audience members asked questions of the trio, most concerning what they could do as individuals to help bring an end to the suffering of peoples in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Congressman Wolf encouraged constituents to write their representatives in Congress in support of boycotting the 2008 Olympics, to be held in Beijing. China, as Wolf and Steidle both explained, is the major purchaser of oil exports from Sudan and in effect provides financial support to the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed militias it employs. These groups are responsible for a great many of the atrocities that continue to take place in Darfur. Wolf explained that the Olympic games provided the perfect opportunity for other nations to pressure the Chinese government to divest itself of interests in Darfur, as its leaders appear to care deeply about international perceptions.

Though Steidle did not share the Congressman's sentiment that people should boycott the Olympics, he did encourage audience members to look over their personal investment portfolios and do some research into what companies were included in various common mutual funds. Steidle suggested individuals divest themselves of companies affiliated with the Chinese government or those who might be doing business in Sudan. Steidle again stressed his belief that the place to start when trying to effect positive change in the world is with oneself. He held up an informational card distributed with tickets to the film that listed several organizations where people could find more information on Darfur and ways in which one could help on an individual basis. Steidle waved the card saying, "Ask yourselves, what can I do? How can I help out? Question yourself. Spend an hour or two on the Internet doing some research and educate yourself about what's going on out in the world. That, I think, is the most important thing."

Other alternatives discussed as possible solutions to the problems in Darfur included the creation of a no-fly zone over the country enforced by the United Nations, increased European Union and African Union troop presence and greater international pressure on countries who financially support Sudan's government.

After the question-and-answer session ended, audience members still seemed rattled and perhaps slow to return to the relatively carefree scene outside the Tally Ho. People hung back and surrounded Steidle, Wallace and Wolf, eager to hear more nuggets of information and suggestions on how they could assuage the image of a suffering people in their minds.

To be sure, this is not a film that will quickly leave one's mind. The Devil Came On Horseback hangs on, haunting the consciousness, leaving an indelible footprint. For those in attendance Friday night, it was a deafening call to address a crisis that must no longer be ignored. The film continues its run at the Tally Ho until Thursday, Sept. 13.

Chad/Darfur: EU Okays Force Plan to Aid Refugees

From Reuters

The European Union approved outline military plans on Tuesday for the deployment of an EU mission in Chad to help protect refugees from Sudan's Darfur conflict, an EU official said.

EU ambassadors backed a "crisis management concept" to provide security for civilians and aid workers, help stabilise eastern Chad and make it easier for humanitarian assistance to get through.

The mission could see up to 4,000 troops on the ground in Eastern Chad and a small adjoining area of the Central African Republic by year-end, the EU official said.

The 27 EU member states are expected to rubber-stamp later this week the concept of operations agreed by ambassadors on Tuesday.

Ministers will take a final decision to launch the joint action later this month after the U.N. Security Council has given green light for the mission.

Some 380,000 civilians are sheltering in eastern Chad. Most fled the civil war in Sudan but about 150,000 are local people forced from their homes as ethnic conflict has spilled over the border.

The European deployment and support for a joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeing force in Darfur would help create the security conditions for renewed peace talks on the confict, due to begin in Libya on Oct. 27.

If all goes to plan, deployment for the EU mission would start at the end of the rainy season, in mid-October, and would be complete by year-end.

The bulk of the troops will be French and its operational headquarter will be in Paris, the official said.

Uganda/DRC: Gov't Denies Its Troops Massing on Border

From Reuters

Uganda's army denied a report on Monday that its troops were massing on the border with Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), after the two countries reached a deal at the weekend meant to reduce tensions.

U.N.-sponsored Radio Okapi in eastern DRC quoted military sources as saying Ugandan soldiers had set up camp at several points along the tense frontier, where a British oil contractor was killed last month in a gunbattle with DRC forces.

The Congolese military was said to be on high alert.

"It is completely not true that we have deployed in the said areas at a time where the two countries are engaged in talks," Uganda's military spokesman Major Felix Kulayigye told Reuters.

"We are simply monitoring our borders because some undisciplined Congolese soldiers have attacked the Ugandan territory in the last month."

At a summit in Arusha, northern Tanzania, on Saturday, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and his DRC counterpart Joseph Kabila agreed to end the border dispute and make more effort to stamp out rebel groups blamed for destabilising eastern DRC.

Speaking to Reuters by satellite telephone, the deputy leader of one of those militias said he was angered by the deal and that his fighters were ready to repel any attack.

"We strongly condemn what Museveni and Kabila agreed on and we are saying that we are ready to fight anyone who attacks us from any side," said Vincent Otti, the fugitive second-in-command of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

The LRA, whose leaders are wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, is holding peace talks in Juba, southern Sudan, with the Ugandan government. But Otti said those negotiations might now be in jeopardy.

"This is contradicting the Juba talks," he said from his forest hideout in northeast Congo. "It is not in good faith. It's against the spirit of peace."

Uganda: Gov't to Start Closing Northern War Camps

From Reuters

The Ugandan government was to begin closing camps on Tuesday for thousands uprooted by two decades of war as security returns to the north of the country.

Leaders of Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels who once terrorised the region are now based far away in northeast Congo, and their representatives have been engaged in peace talks with Uganda's government in Juba, south Sudan, for more than a year.

As a result, many of the displaced are now leaving the sprawling camps -- which once housed as many as 1.7 million people in squalid conditions -- and returning to their villages.

"This is the beginning of real resumption of life in northern Uganda because there is relative security now and this trend will only get better," Ruth Nankabirwa, Uganda's minister of state for defence, told Reuters.

She said the government and the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR planned a ceremony at two camps in Lira district on Tuesday where huts would be bulldozed and pit toilets filled.

Lira is in the Lango Region bordering Acholiland, which was the epicentre of the conflict and is made up of Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts.

Lira also suffered horrific violence during the war, including the massacre of more than 200 people in an attack by LRA fighters on Barlonyo camp in February 2004.

UNHCR said in a statement the closure of 40 camps by mid-next year was due to better security and the peace talks.

It said more than 90 percent of some 466,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Lango in 2005 had now returned home.

"However, the situation is different in the Acholi region where, out of some 1.1 million IDPs in 2005, more than 63 percent remain in the camps," UNHCR said.

Another obstacle to resettlement in the north has been floods hitting wide swathes of Lira and neighbouring Teso.

"The floods are but a temporary setback," Nankabirwa said. "The soils are soggy and the people cannot build huts ... that is stopping many of them from returning to their homes."

Darfur: Head of Peacekeeping Mission Confident Despite Shortfalls

From the AP

A large and complex peacekeeping operation planned for Darfur will launch on time and could, within months, improve security in the war-torn region of western Sudan, the mission's head said.

Rodolphe Adada, chief of the United Nations and African Union joint mission to Darfur, said contributing nations have already committed more than the 26,000 required troops for the force, and he expects the peacekeepers to deploy in October.

"That won't mean we'll have all the elements of the force on the ground, but we'll be operational," he said in an interview with The Associated Press late Sunday.

The joint mission will take over from an African Union force of 7,000 currently in Darfur, and Adada said he expected to begin operating with some 10,000 troops, including the African contingents already in place.

He said the joint mission, called UNAMID, would meet the deadline set by the U.N. Security Council to replace the African Union force by Dec. 31. "Hopefully, we'll be in full gear by March," Adada said.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Monday he was "encouraged to have received ... even more contributions than we may actually need."

"Still we are lacking in the specialized areas, like air transportation and experts in finance. We'd like to have contributions from non-African Union countries, particularly European countries," Ban told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York.

Ban, who visited Darfur last week to press for an end to the conflict, has warned the new force faces "enormously complex" logistical challenges. Some observers are skeptical such a large force will manage to deploy on time.

Darfur civilians have grown increasingly frustrated with the African Union force's lack of protection since it arrived in June 2004. They hope the new, hybrid U.N.-African Union force's ability to secure refugee camps and towns will be a key factor to bring back stability.

One of the main weaknesses of the African Union's current force is a mandate more focused on monitoring violence than preventing it. Adada said the UNAMID's rules of engagement, under which troops are allowed to shoot, will provide for stronger protection.

The resolution that created the joint force includes some clauses under Chapter 7 of the U.N. charter _ which allows for the strongest use of force _ and U.N. diplomats say the mission's rules of engagement should be signed Sept. 21, when the U.N. General Assembly gathers.

The deployment will come as a new peace conference between Darfur rebel groups and the Sudanese government begins Oct. 27 in Libya. At least one leading rebel chief, Abdel Wahid Elnur, has said he would refuse to take part before U.N. peacekeepers are fully in place.

The previous peace deal, signed in May 2006 between one rebel group and Sudan's central government, is viewed as largely ineffective at reducing violence in Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have died since fighting began four years ago.

"Bringing security will be our top priority. Everything else will proceed from that," said Adada, 61, who was foreign minister of the Republic of Congo in central Africa before his appointment to UNAMID.

He said 6,000 police and troops would focus immediately on pacifying Darfur's sprawling refugee camps, where 2.5 million people _ over a third of Darfur's population _ now live.

With a total of about 31,000 staff _ nearly 20,000 soldiers, 6,000 police and 5,000 civilians _ the mission will be one of the largest ever launched by the United Nations. Its initial budget will run at more than $2.5 billion a year, Adada said, and seven camps have to be built to house the force in Darfur, a semi-desert landlocked region that lacks most basic infrastructure.

There also remain several unknowns about how to manage a force under the joint oversight of the U.N. and African Union. Sudan's government had rejected a previous Security Council resolution for a U.N. peacekeeping force last year, and the current hybrid mission was only accepted after several months of negotiations to guarantee it would have a predominantly African character.

African Union chairman Alpha Oumar Konare said last month that African nations had offered enough troops to compose all of UNAMID. But some of the proposed forces don't have the appropriate gear, and Adada said his mission, though predominantly African, would probably include as many as 90 nationalities.

Engineering corps and helicopter units would likely come from other continents and the mission is still lacking some firm commitments on equipment such as armored vehicles, he said.

Darfur: Sudan Bombs Northern Town

From Reuters

Sudanese government planes bombed a rebel-controlled town in Darfur on Monday, an insurgent group said, hours after the government said it was investigating a bloody rebel raid on one of its bases last month.

Abu-Bakr Mohammed Kadu, a field commander in the Sudanese Liberation Army's Unity (SLA-Unity) faction, said government aircraft bombed Haskanita then ground forces entered the town in northern Darfur.

"The clashes are still going on," he told Reuters just after 4.30 p.m. local time (1330 GMT). He said Haskanita was predominantly a civilian area but could not give an estimate of casualties.

Sudanese military officials were not available for comment.

Kadu could not confirm whether the attack was in retaliation for a raid by the SLA-Unity and the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) on a government base just over 200 km (125 miles) east of Haskanita at the end of August.

The justice ministry said on Monday it had launched an inquiry into six JEM members who it suspects masterminded the attack that killed 41 people at the government base in the town of Wad Banda in the Kordofan region across the border from Darfur.

Reports of Monday's attack on Haskanita came seven weeks before the start of peace talks between Khartoum and rebel groups, expected to take place in Libya on Oct. 27.

It also coincided with renewed calls from the United Nations for Sudan and rebel groups to cease hostilities and prepare for the arrival of a 26,000 strong force of U.N./African Union peacekeepers.

Darfur: Sudan Investigating, Preparing Warrants for Rebels Over Attack

From Reuters

Sudan is investigating six Darfur rebel leaders it suspects masterminded a bloody attack on a government base, the Justice Ministry said on Monday.

Sudanese state media reported the officials were preparing arrest warrants for the six members of rebel of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). But Justice Minister Mohammed Ali al-Mardi told Reuters officials were still investigating the scene of the attack and no decisions on warrants had been made.

Khartoum said 41 people were killed when JEM rebels attacked a police base in the town of Wad Banda in Kordofan region, 200 km (125 miles) from the border with Darfur late last month.

"Prosecutors are in the area and there are legal actions to be taken," said the Justice Minister.

"If it turns out that these people have left the country then it would be appropriate to consider arrest warrants through Interpol. The question of arrest warrants inside Sudan is for the security council in the area."

JEM claimed responsibility for the August 29 attack, but insisted it was on a military base, manned by 1,700 troops and used for launching government-backed raids against southern Darfur. The government denies the charges.

JEM commanders were not immediately available for comment.

The announcement of the investigation came seven weeks before the start of peace talks between Khartoum and rebel groups, expected to take place in Libya on October 27.

It also coincided with fresh reports of violence and lawlessness in war-torn Darfur.

...

Despite the persisting unrest, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who wrapped up a six-day tour of Sudan, Libya and Chad on Sunday, said that "credible progress" had been made towards peace in Darfur.

Ban said the priority now was to persuade as many Darfur rebel groups as possible to attend the Libyan talks.

Riek Machar, the vice president of the semi-autonomous southern Sudan, flew to France late on Sunday with a team of senior politicians to try and persuade one key Darfur rebel leader to attend the negotiations.

Abdel Wahid Mohamed el-Nur, the Paris-based founder of the Sudan Liberation Movement, has so far refused to take part, demanding an end to hostilities in Darfur before talks.

"They've gone to convince him to join the peace talks process," South Sudan Minister for Presidential Affairs Luka Biong told Reuters.

Another rebel leader, Suleiman Jamous, said on Monday he was still waiting for details on when he would be allowed to fly to Kenya for medical treatment, six days after Sudan's president promised he would be allowed to leave.

Jamous, the Sudan Liberation Army's humanitarian coordinator who needs a stomach biopsy, has been under effective house arrest in a U.N. hospital near Darfur for more than a year.

Sudan originally threatened to arrest Jamous if he left U.N. care but President Omar Hassan al-Bashir last week gave Ban a pledge that Jamous would be able to leave as soon as possible.

Bashir is expected to hold talks with the British Foreign Office Minister for Africa, Lord Mark Malloch Brown, who arrived in Khartoum on Monday ahead of a one-day visit to Darfur.

Darfur: Save Us From Hell

From The Observer

It seems both intangible and hopeless. Until you find yourself inches from a woman like Hawaye, her baby daughter Nadjva sucking on her malnourished breast as she tells us what drove her from Sudan to the Djabal refugee camp where we sit. 'They came at seven to our village, the janjaweed militia,' she says, the fact that she mentions the time seeming a poignant effort to give some structure to the evil that followed. Her husband was away when the rebels arrived and set about their business - the livestock rounded up, homes torched, men and boys mutilated and murdered, and finally the moment that she replays over and over, when one of the horsemen rode up and, with a machete, decapitated the baby that she held in her arms. She didn't have time to mourn. The murderers took her with them and kept her hostage for 15 days, repeatedly raping and violating her before they moved on.

But for many women, surviving is the worst-case scenario. Hawaye was reunited with her husband, but the fact that she had lived made her guilty of complicity in her 'loss of honour'. He divorced her. She briefly got lucky when another refugee with two children married her, a rare occurrence for rape victims, who are seen as unclean. You are no doubt hoping for a happy ending? When he found out about her ordeal, which she had kept secret in fear and shame, he also divorced her. Taking with him three of their four children. Now she lives hand-to-mouth, discriminated against in a misogynistic culture which refuses to differentiate between rape and adultery, even when the crime is being used as a weapon of war against its own women. Hawaye has no hope for the future and lives solely for her only remaining child, her daughter, haunted day and night by the atrocities she has suffered.

I listened to many other first-hand accounts of similar horrors in the company of eight eminent political leaders and campaigners, all women, who had come to the camps to bear witness to what is happening. Led by Ireland's former President Mary Robinson, and including four of Africa's most inspirational women, there wasn't a dry eye among them by the time Hawaye herself broke down. Nigeria's ex-finance minister and former World Bank vice-president Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Kenya's Dr Musimbi Kanyoro, secretary general of the World YWCA, a global movement of 25 million women committed to female empowerment; Bineta Diop, Senegalese founder of Femmes Africa Solidarite; Asha Hagi Elmi Amin, an exiled Somali, member of the transitional parliament in Mogadishu and the Pan African Parliament, and founder of Save Somali Women and Children; none of them strangers to the brutality of war, all silenced by the horror of what we heard.

I was a mere six hours' flight from London, my mobile phone worked perfectly, yet it felt like a different universe. Arriving at the camps of Goz Beida a few hours earlier, I admit my first feeling was one of confusion. Where were the starving and the desperate? There was even a centuries-past charm about this lush plain littered with well tended grass huts. Although the huge spread of hastily erected tarpaulin-roofed shacks detracted from the view, I'd seen much worse on television. Yet beneath the veneer of order achieved by the dedicated charity staff from the likes of Oxfam and Save the Children, the reality is terrible. Under the fragile layer of grass that the rainy season has produced lies red earth that will soon be cracked and dry. As the leaden skies and torrential rains recede, so the rebels, those real-life horsemen of the apocalypse, will resume their murderous rampages. More women like Hawaye and her companions will have their lives destroyed and their children murdered.

Chad/Darfur: EU on Course for Force to Aid Refugees

From Reuters

The European Union is on course to agree this month on the deployment of a military mission in Chad to help protect refugees from Sudan's Darfur conflict, the United Nations' peacekeeping chief said on Monday.

Jean-Marie Guehenno, a U.N. assistant secretary-general, briefed EU ambassadors on talks in Sudan, Chad and Libya and told reporters all regional players backed a European operation to protect civilians and help stabilise eastern Chad.

"Things are moving in the right direction," Guehenno said. He said he expected the U.N. Security Council to give a green light for a 3,000-strong EU mission in mid-month, clearing the way for a final decision by the 27-nation EU in late September.

The European deployment and support for a joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeing force in Darfur would help create the security conditions for renewed peace talks on the confict, due to begin in Libya on Oct. 27.

Guehenno said he was also looking to Europe to help provide armoured and transport helicopters for a joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, to deploy troops quickly and deter attacks on humanitarian workers and civilians.

"We don't have all the helicopters we need," he said, adding that Middle Eastern states had offered some armed helicopters.

Some 380,000 civilians are sheltering in eastern Chad. Most fled the civil war in Sudan but about 150,000 are local people forced from their homes as ethnic conflict has spilled over the border.

EU ambassadors heard a report from military planners last week calling the Chad operation useful and feasible. France, the former colonial power which maintains a military presence in Chad, is expected to provide the operation headquarters and about half the troops.

If all goes to plan, deployment would start at the end of the rainy season, in mid-October, and would be complete by year-end. The force strength would be at least 3,000, possibly rising to 4,000. It will initially have a mandate of 12 months.

General Henri Bentegeat, the French head of the EU's Military Committee, said the force would be big enough to deter potential attackers because it was made up of European troops, but he acknowledged helicopters could be a problem.

"The deployment of helicopters is almost always refused at the political level because of cost," Bentegeat told the Security and Defence Agenda think-tank.

Darfur: Man on a Mission

The latest podcast from the Committee on Conscience, featuring Brian Steidle

JERRY FOWLER: And this might be a good time just to ask, in reading through the book there are a few accounts of attacks by the rebels, but it seemed that most of the stories that you tell are attacks by the government and often attacks against civilians.

BRIAN STEIDLE: Yeah, I would say probably around 98%-- 95, 98%-- of the investigations we did were violations of the government. They were- sometimes they were investigations against the rebels, of course-- the rebels are not angels-- but a lot of the complaints we received from the government that the rebels attacked them were unsubstantiated and after we did our investigation we found that there was no evidence of an attack, and so the majority of them were definitely violations by the government.

JERRY FOWLER: There was one story in the book that was of a type that I had never heard before from Darfur, and that was where you went to a village and the villagers had been attacked by the government and they were describing clouds of gas, and you thought that there might have been some form of chemical weapon used. Can you tell us about that?

BRIAN STEIDLE: Yeah, there was one attack in the village of Katil south of Nyala, where there were a number of RPG rounds, rocket propelled grenades, that were fired into the village, and some of these produced, by both the rebels' account and the individual's accounts, the civilians of the village, accounted that there was gas that was produced by them, which made them choke and cough, and we suspected that they were somehow packed with CS, with teargas, that were used on these villages-- which is classified under the Geneva Convention as a chemical weapon.

JERRY FOWLER: But that did not up end actually being in the report that was sent up to the AU, did it?

BRIAN STEIDLE: No, it did not. That was- that was something that was taken out. The AU Team members did not feel that it was important to include in the report, and I of course thought that it was very important to show that there was use of these types of weapons on the civilian population.

JERRY FOWLER: And actually later on then in your stay there you ended up getting tear gassed yourself did not you?

BRIAN STEIDLE: Yes we did. We were investigating an evacuation and leveling of an IDP camp, Internally Displaced Person's camp, and the government would not allow anybody to come in. They kicked out all the NGOs before they started kicking the people out. And so we were there on the ground of course because we were able to go wherever we wanted to, and they did not want us taking pictures of them bulldozing this IDP Camp, so they decided to drop teargas grenades right next to us, which was an unpleasant experience but at least in the United States Military we were all qualified to use CS, and in order to do that you have to go through a- a CS chamber. So I knew the effects of it and how to deal with it.

JERRY FOWLER: But were there any repercussions to the government for tear gassing these international monitors?

BRIAN STEIDLE: No there was not. Basically the African Union has not- they have a very delicate balancing act. They are there because they have been invited by the Sudanese government and so if they speak too strongly against the Sudanese government then they risk being kicked out and then there will be no one on the ground to actually monitor what is happening. So there was a very delicate balancing act. I think there was possibly a letter that was sent up to the command saying we do not approve of you using this; but besides that there was nothing.

JERRY FOWLER: One thing that struck me in reading the book, you arrive in Darfur and you immediately go into the field, you start going on patrols, you start going and seeing villages that have been attacked. And there are really some horrific stories, atrocities. And I have to say in reading it, it was-- exhausting is not quite the right word-- it was powerful, it was moving, but it was also- it was overwhelming. And then you get to a point and you say, "And that was the end of my first week in Darfur."

BRIAN STEIDLE: Yeah, yeah, it was. We would do at least an investigation a day and then we would receive two to three complaints every single day. I was there at a time when the Sudanese government was on a major offensive in South Darfur, with thousands of troops and thousands- hundreds and thousands of Janjaweed, moving through these villages. So they were attacking a new village every single day. On one of the days we saw 37 villages burned in the same day, and so it was a very intense time and we just tried to address as many of them as we possibly could.

JERRY FOWLER: And so you were seeing this violence and you make the comment at some point where you say that having been in the Marines you felt that you had been desensitized to violence, and you talk about when you were in training as a Marine you would go and spend time in the Emergency Room in an inner city hospital and see casualties brought in, and it got to where it did not bother you. But then it sounds like there is this process in Darfur where it began to bother you, where you were not desensitized perhaps any more. How did that happen?

BRIAN STEIDLE: Well, I think that you never really get desensitized to civilians being ruthlessly murdered. You can get used to blood. And that is something I have never really had a problem with. But when you see these people murdered, you never really get used to it. And people say, “Well, you just turn off your emotions while you are there. You just turn the switch off.” And that is really not true. I mean, those emotions are always there, and they will come up later on after you leave the situation or after you leave to come back to the States. But the emotions are always there.

Darfur/Chad: Echoes of Genocide

A new report from ENOUGH

Is the genocide in Darfur over? Is what is happening now in Darfur and eastern Chad a matter of anarchy, chaos, and “inter-tribal” warfare?

Reports in major news outlets suggest that genocidal attacks by Khartoum-sponsored militia are a thing of the past and that Darfur’s agony is borne of anarchy. Clearly, the violence in Darfur has escalated—but suggesting that the crisis there is now a free-for-all, with the moral equivalency that phrase implies, ignores the political logic driving a catastrophe that appears, on the surface, to be defined by armed chaos. The reality is far different—and for the recently-authorized AU-UN peacekeeping force and upcoming peace negotiations to be successful, that reality must be understood.

A recent opinion piece in The Washington Post stated as “fact” that genocide has “concluded” in Darfur. However, the notion that there has been a definable transition “from genocide to anarchy,” as Alex de Waal and Julie Flint titled their piece, misses the broader context of the process that is underway in Darfur. The Darfur these authors melodramatically describe—a “murky world of tribes-in-arms and warlords who serve the highest bidder” —is precisely what the architects of genocide in Khartoum had in mind when, beginning in mid-2003, Sudan’s government set forth to destroy and displace the civilian support base for Darfur’s rebel groups. The promotion of anarchy and inter-communal (or, popularly, “inter-tribal”) fighting is part and parcel of Khartoum’s genocidal counter-insurgency campaign. The conditions in Darfur and eastern Chad today are not evidence of an end to genocide and the onset of an entirely new and different war—they are the echoes of genocide.

Darfur: Vacuous Diplomacy and Specious Declarations

The latest from Eric Reeves

Although still notionally “in progress,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s mission to Sudan on behalf of Darfur has clearly failed to register significant political progress on any front. And insofar as this mission marks a culmination of UN and international efforts---in Ban’s words, represents an “attempt to lock in progress” on Darfur---the failure is all the greater. Certainly if this visit marks the limit of pressure on Khartoum to abide by its many commitments---made or “demanded” over more than four years---the regime’s génocidaires must be a good deal more confident. They will certainly know that the large civilian police and military force authorized by Security Council Resolution 1769 is little threat to the status quo, indeed seems to fall daily further behind schedule, even as it lacks the commitment of critical human and material resources. As a consequence, Khartoum understands full well that for the foreseeable future it can control deployment of this force, as well as manipulate security conditions in Darfur and eastern Chad, and threaten humanitarian operations throughout the region at will.

Ban declared in Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan:

"‘For too long the international community has stood by, as seemingly helpless witnesses. That is now changing.’” (Agence France-Presse [dateline: el-Fasher, North Darfur], September 5, 2007)

Perhaps Ban offers here a fair assessment of his predecessor, Kofi Annan; but Ban himself is very far from demonstrating that we are seeing any “change” from “helpless witnessing.” The notable exception is the continuing efforts and courageous commitments of humanitarian workers and organizations---even as humanitarians are themselves among those most vulnerable to the violent insecurity that has emerged in Darfur following more than four years of international acquiescence.

Ban disingenuously presents himself as having…

“a three-part strategy to deal with the Darfur crisis by ensuring that peacekeepers are deployed quickly and effectively, humanitarian aid and development is more easily available and the peace process pushes forward.” (UN News Service [New York], August 28, 2007)

But all the Secretary-General has done here is enumerate, in the broadest of terms, the conspicuous challenges in Darfur---he hasn’t articulated a “strategy” for dealing with them. Indeed, the threats to adequate humanitarian aid seem only to grow, as does the security crisis confronting aid organizations (see overview of recent developments in the humanitarian crisis below). Civilians in the camps confront growing violence, with little hope for the start of either a credible cease-fire or meaningful peace talks.

Certainly the challenges to deployment of the force specified in UN Security Council Resolution 1769, and authorized under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, only grow (see my recent analysis of these challenges at http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article182.html). The August 31, 2007 deadline for commitments to this force has come and gone, and there remains an acute shortage of well-trained civilian police, deficits in skilled personnel for a range of essential tasks in the mission, and vast shortcomings in essential equipment, especially aircraft. No significant commitment of intelligence-gathering resources---crucial in a region as large as Darfur---has been announced.

Mark Kroeker, outgoing UN head of police operations, put a key matter bluntly:

“The number of officers from major developed nations was dwindling and countries such as Britain, the United States, Canada, Italy and France needed to offer more. ‘The countries that have been talking about Darfur need to now do something about Darfur with their deployment of police in probably the most desperate place in the world,’ Kroeker [said].” (Reuters [dateline: Canberra, Australia], August 30, 2007)

The same could be said of these countries when it comes to aerial and satellite reconnaissance capabilities.

For its part, Khartoum seems only to be warming up in its efforts to diminish the effectiveness of the force; but the Sudan Tribune (August 19, 2007) reports a telling comment from General Majzoub Rahamah, the officer in charge of international relations at the defense ministry:

“[General Rahamah] said that the military personnel in the [UN/AU] hybrid operation do not have the right to protect civilians. He further said that this force has the right to act under chapter 7 only in the case of self-defense.”

Khartoum is far from finished in curtailing the mandate of the “hybrid” force or devising means for compromising its ability to address insecurity.

Darfur: Rebels Disappointed by Ban's Visit

From Reuters

Darfur rebel leaders on Friday expressed disappointment with the U.N. Secretary General's visit to Sudan over the last three days and said they had low expectations for peace talks next month.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and the Sudanese government on Thursday set a date and venue for talks between Khartoum and Darfur rebels to push for peace ahead of the deployment of 26,000 peacekeepers in Darfur.

But some rebel leaders said Ban, who visited a Darfur refugee camp during his trip and later met Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, had failed to pressure Sudan to acknowledge key Darfur grievances, which they said would be necessary for the October 27 talks in Libya to succeed.

"(Ban) has not met the expectation of the people of Darfur," a leader of the Sudan Liberation Army, Ahmed Abdel Shafie, told Reuters by telephone from Uganda.

"The U.N. needs to put pressure on Sudan to stop the settlement that is taking place in Darfur. There are new Arab tribes that the government brought from Niger and Chad and the government is settling them in Darfur to change the demography of the region before elections," he said.

"I was shocked the UN did not condemn the government for that behavior ... We expected Ban to take measures to put pressure on Sudan for this issue," he added.

Shafie said he favored negotiations as a means to end the conflict, but said little could be accomplished without pressure from the United Nations on Sudan.

The upcoming peace conference would seek to end nearly 4-1/2 years of violence, which has generated one of the world's worst humanitarian crises and sparked U.S. accusations -- dismissed by Sudan -- of genocide.

International experts estimate some 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have fled their homes in Darfur since mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms against the government in 2003, accusing it of neglect. Khartoum puts the death toll at 9,000.

The United States had welcomed the plans for the peace talks and said it was ready to support them.

But Shafie said Ban's contact with the troubled region had been inadequate.

"We hoped that he could have visited more camps in Darfur so he could have witnessed the deteriorating situation that has been created since the government of Sudan deployed its militias and cut off the roads," he said.

Rebel leader Abdel Wahid Mohamed el-Nur, founder of the Sudan Liberation Movement, living in Paris, said Ban did not consult him or other rebel leaders in planning the negotiations.

"In all negotiations, the parties are supposed to agree on three things: the venue, the time factor and the mediators. I am confused why Mr. Secretary General made these statements without consulting us about any of these things," Nur told Reuters from Paris.

Nur, who commands few troops in Darfur, but enjoys huge support in the refugee camps, said he would not attend the talks.

"We are not going to participate in these negotiations. Our principles are very clear. We want security for our people first," he said.

Chad: Willing to Help U.N. Peace Efforts

From Reuters

Chad will back United Nations moves to end the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region by allowing international peacekeepers on its own soil and supporting peace talks, President Idriss Deby said on Friday.

Deby made the commitment to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who was in Chad on a regional tour to canvass support for the U.N.'s peacekeeping initiative for Darfur.

After Ban met Sudanese leaders in Khartoum on Thursday, Sudan's government announced it would start talks in Libya on Oct. 27 with rebel groups to try to forge a peace in Darfur, where political and ethnic violence has raged since 2003.

"We've agreed to contribute all we can to this effort to resolve the Sudanese conflict," Deby told reporters.

He said Chad was offering to host a preliminary meeting for the Darfur rebel leaders to smooth out obstacles and difficulties prior to the October talks in Tripoli.

The Darfur conflict, which has killed some 200,000 people and driven more than 2 million from their homes, has spilled refugees, rebels and militiamen over the border into Chad, spawning inter-ethnic violence and a humanitarian crisis.

Ban told reporters before meeting Deby it was encouraging that the Chadian president had agreed to the deployment of a European Union peacekeeping force on Chad's eastern border as part of the U.N.'s efforts to end the Darfur conflict.

Complementing plans for a 26,000-strong joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force for Darfur, up to 3,000 European Union troops are to be deployed in eastern Chad and north Central African Republic to try to contain the spread of violence.

"Chad is one of the important regional players in addressing the situation in Darfur," Ban said.

Previous talks on Darfur held in Nigeria produced a 2006 peace deal between the government and one Darfur rebel group that failed to end bloodshed despite the deployment of 7,000 African Union peacekeepers.

As Ban arrived in N'Djamena, the U.N. World Food Programme appealed for emergency funds to feed more than 400,000 refugees and displaced civilians in eastern Chad who have fled the regional violence. More than half are refugees from Darfur.

U.N. agencies are caring for the refugees in teeming camps, and the WFP said $81 million was required to feed the needy in 2008.

"Donors need to act now to avoid the risk of any delay in providing food for hundreds of thousands of people who entirely depend on WFP for their daily survival," Felix Bamezon, WFP country director, said in a statement.

Jean-Marie Guehenno, head of the UN peacekeeping department, said 300 U.N. police instructors would train 850 Chadian police to help guard the refugee camps, while the planned EU military force would have a wider security role.

"The military is not focusing on the camps but the lines of communication are fragile. You have sort of roaming bands that can really make up a threat, first to the population and to any international deployment as they move around," he told reporters on the flight from Khartoum.

"So the main purpose of the EU force would be to ensure the area's security and obviously to protect civilians in imminent danger," he added.

He said the EU force would not patrol the border itself because Chad was concerned there should be no overlap with a Chad-Sudan-Libya border monitoring accord.

Guehenno said he would go to Brussels on Monday to talk to the EU, which is expected to give the final go-ahead for the planned Chad force on Sept. 17.

DRC: Fighting Erupts Again in East

From the AP

New clashes erupted Friday between a renegade general's forces and government troops in eastern Congo, and the U.N. said violence was hampering efforts to deliver food to tens of thousands of displaced civilians.

The latest fighting pitting supporters of former Gen. Laurent Nkunda and army troops took place in Rumangabo, a village about 40 miles north of the regional capital, Goma, said Maj. Gabriel De Brosses, a spokesman for U.N. peacekeepers.

The two sides have clashed elsewhere in North Kivu province for a week. On Thursday, commanders agreed to a truce in the town of Sake, west of Goma.

Reached by phone from the area, Nkunda accused the army of breaking the truce. The army "tried to get back positions we captured in Rumangabo," Nkunda said. "We are resisting, that is why there is fighting."

Army officials could not be reached for comment, but a U.N.-funded radio station in Congo cited army and police sources as saying that Nkunda's men attacked the village.

De Brosses said the U.N. peacekeeping mission brokered Thursday's truce, but it only applied to Sake.

The fighting has displaced tens of thousands of people in Congo. Up to 35,000 refugees have also crossed the border into Uganda in the past five days, the U.N. refugee agency said in a statement in Kampala, Uganda. The refugees began crossing Monday into the small Ugandan border town of Bunagana.

The U.N. World Food Program said fighting in North Kivu was hampering efforts to send food to those in Congo who have fled recent clashes. The U.N. called for $12 million to buy food for the region.

"This is a real and worsening crisis," said WFP Deputy Country Director Claude Jibidar. "The fighting is uprooting more people everyday and making it ever harder for WFP to reach them with the assistance they urgently need."

The clashes are "restricting humanitarian access and food deliveries to areas beyond Goma. Roads are unsafe," the WFP statement said.

On Wednesday a U.N. helicopter airlifting flour, peas, cooking oil and sugar to Masisi district had to turn back "because of the conflict," WFP said. Masisi is an area of steep, rolling green hills outside Goma.

Aid workers said the displaced population at a makeshift camp at Mugunga, had swelled to 27,000 people, most of whom fled Sake and its environs.

"We sleep under the stars without shelter. We have nothing to eat because we brought nothing with us," one of the displaced, a pastor named Jean Balengele, told AP by telephone. "Nobody here is giving us anything."

In Kinshasa, the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, John Holmes, urged all armed groups in North Kivu not to target civilians and "allow humanitarian workers, who are bringing aid to vulnerable populations in need, unconditional and free access."

State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said Thursday the U.S. "calls on all leaders to stop the violence which continues to threaten innocent lives and displace thousands of civilians."

Darfur: Peace Talks Set For Oct. 27 in Libya

From Reuters

Sudan and Darfur rebels will hold talks on Oct. 27 in Libya to push for peace ahead of the expected deployment of a 26,000-strong peace force in Darfur, a U.N.-Sudanese government statement said on Thursday.

The statement said the United Nations "expresses the hope that parties will cooperate fully" with U.N. and African Union (AU) mediators.

The announcement came as U.N Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon came to the end of a three-day tour of Sudan where he held talks with President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and leaders of key Darfur rebel factions.

Ban told a news conference the Libya talks would be held under the mediation of U.N. Darfur envoy Jan Eliasson and his African Union counterpart Salim Ahmed Salim.

"I urge and expect all parties to respect their commitments to cease all hostilities immediately," Ban said.

International experts estimate some 200,000 people have died and more than 2 million have been driven from their homes in Darfur since the conflict broke out in 2003. Khartoum puts the death toll at 9,000.

A 2006 peace deal between Khartoum and one rebel faction failed to quell the violence in the western region. In July, the U.N. Security Council approved a plan for 26,000 U.N. and African Union peacekeepers to take over from a smaller and ineffective AU force currently operating in Darfur.

Ban has said that the U.N.-AU force cannot be effective unless "there is a peace to keep".

From the AP

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir announced Thursday that new peace talks to end the 4 year conflict in Darfur will start Oct. 27 in Libya.

There was no immediate word from Darfur rebels whether they would attend the conference. Most rebels have rejected a peace deal that one rebel faction signed with Khartoum last year, and Ban — on his first visit to Sudan — has been pressing to get the groups to the negotiating table.

A joint communique issued by Ban and al-Bashir after their second round of talks in Khartoum stressed the importance of reaching a political solution to the conflict that has left more than 200,000 people dead and 2.5 million uprooted from their homes.

Ban has pressed hard to get the splintered rebel groups back to the negotiating table. His joint announcement with al-Bashir signaled that a date and venue have been set — but the real test will be whether rebel movements would agree to take part in the talks.

The May 2006 peace deal signed by the Sudanese government and one rebel group in Abuja, Nigeria, has largely fallen apart and the continued violence has prompted the need for deploying U.N. peacekeepers.

Tripoli has in the past hosted several lower-level meetings to try to get the disparate rebel groups together but with no success. Ban, who is on a weeklong Africa tour, will fly to Libya on Saturday, after a stop in Chad.

Darfur's bloodletting began in 2003, when ethnic African rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated central government, accusing it of discrimination. Khartoum is accused of retaliating by unleashing janjaweed militias, blamed for the worst atrocities against civilians. The government denies the accusations.

Ban and al-Bashir's joint note also expressed hope that the rebel groups will "cooperate fully ... to ensure that the negotiations are concluded as expeditiously as possible."

For its part, the Sudanese government pledged to "prepare for and participate constructively in renewed negotiations on Darfur," to be held under U.N. and African Union mediation, it said.

In the note, made available to The Associated Press, Sudan also pledged to work with the U.N. and AU to "facilitate the timely deployment" of a new 26,000 strong joint AU-U.N. peacekeeping force for Darfur.

The United Nations, in turn, pledged "to do its utmost ... to deploy the hybrid operation in a timely fashion in support of peace consolidation in Darfur."

At a press conference later Thursday, Ban and al-Bashir expressed concern at "continuing humanitarian suffering and insecurity in Darfur."

When Ban took the reins of the United Nations in January, he made Darfur a top priority and appointed former Swedish ambassador Jan Eliasson to join the AU efforts to get all rebel factions to the peace table.

Ban's visit in Sudan also focused on pressing the government for speedier deployment of a the new peacekeeping force for Darfur.

After visiting Darfur Wednesday and seeing first hand the plight of the Darfurians, Ban said he had even great resolve to try to bring peace to their land.

In Al Salaam, home to 46,000 Darfur refugees, Ban promised to step up efforts to end the protracted conflict and urged the world to be more sympathetic to the millions whose lives have been uprooted.

The secretary-general brushed aside a brief disruption during his meeting Wednesday at a U.N. compound with representatives from three Darfur camps that heightened security fears, and a small protest by well-dressed women shouting against the upcoming deployment of U.N. troops there.

Ban said he understands the frustrations of the millions uprooted from their homes. "They really wanted to see some hope from me, from the United Nations, from the international community," he said.

There was wide speculation Wednesday that Ban's trip to a Darfur refugee camp would be called off because of security concerns. Two Sudanese journalists received calls from people in Khartoum who said violent clashes had broken out at Al Salaam camp.

There was no violence during the secretary-general's brief visit to the Al Salaam camp, but U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said there were reports of some violent clashes afterward, though she had no details.

Most of the refugees who greeted Ban appeared to be supporters of Abdel Wahid Nur, who leads a major faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement group and remains the key holdout in getting all rebel groups and the government back to the negotiating table.

At every opportunity, the U.N. chief stressed the importance of reaching a political settlement and deploying the AU-U.N. hybrid force quickly.

AU officials who talked with Ban said they told him the beleaguered AU force now in Darfur has less then 6,000 peacekeepers deployed in a region nearly the size of France — down from its authorized strength of 7,000. AU officials said the groundwork for deploying the hybrid force is on schedule, but it is not expected to start arriving in Darfur until early next year.

Darfur: Holding Khartoum Accountable

An op-ed by Eric Reeves in The Boston Globe

DOES GENOCIDE continue in Darfur? Do we still see "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, [Darfur's African ethnic groups] as such," the high standard set by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention? The question acquires urgency as skepticism grows in some quarters about the intentions of Khartoum's Islamist regime. Genocide is a crime of intent, not motive; if the intention of Khartoum is no longer genocidal, their moral and negotiating equities change considerably in any peace talks with fractious rebel groups.

Some skepticism about genocide in Darfur is politically motivated: much of the British left regards Darfur advocacy as a diversion from Iraq. The Bush administration, embarrassed by its weak actions following a September 2004 genocide determination, has attempted to "walk back" the g-word. Yet others argue - to diminish the urgency of deploying military protection - that Darfur's terrible realities are much improved and no longer deserve such strenuous characterization.

But though violence in Darfur has mutated, we still receive many reports about acts enumerated in the Genocide Convention. Ethnically targeted violence, orchestrated by Khartoum, continues to be chronicled by human rights investigators, though it has certainly diminished since the height of massacres and village destruction from early 2003 through early 2005. Reports of ethnically targeted rape by Khartoum's Janjaweed militia are ongoing. The regime continues its indiscriminate aerial bombardment of African villages.

What works in part to justify skepticism about continuing "genocide" is that following the ill-conceived Darfur Peace Agreement (May 2006), violence and threats to the civilian population became much more chaotic. Rebel groups fractured, warlordism became rampant, and ethnic violence among Arab tribal groups emerged in deadly fashion. Violent threats to humanitarian relief come from all armed groups in Darfur.

But Khartoum has engaged in its own unrelenting war on aid efforts. This vicious campaign of obstruction works to sustain a grim "genocide by attrition" among the African victims of earlier ethnically targeted violence. Recently, the head of a vital humanitarian agency was expelled from Sudan on preposterous charges of "espionage." Earlier this year, UN and humanitarian workers were assaulted and held by Khartoum's security forces in the capital of North Darfur - two victims were sexually assaulted. Medical supplies have been arbitrarily held in Khartoum.

Often ignored in the debate about genocide is the nature of antecedent violence that produced the staggering population of 4.2 million conflict-affected persons in Darfur, including more than 2.5 million people uprooted from their homes. A key passage in the Genocide Convention specifies acts "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

When Khartoum's regular forces and brutal Arab militia allies destroyed African villages, the effort was typically comprehensive: demolishing or poisoning precious water wells and irrigation systems; destroying food- and seed-stocks, cutting down mature fruit trees; looting or killing livestock. Such deliberately destructive violence, the mass executions of African men and boys, and the racialized use of rape as a weapon produced the desperate humanitarian crisis. The worst violence may be past; but the consequences of livelihoods destroyed remain.

Moreover, to ignore these features of the Darfur genocide, to emphasize temporary declines in mortality and violence, risks missing the most ominous threat: accelerating violence against camps of African populations. Ongoing violence also threatens the viability of humanitarian operations. According to Jan Egeland, former UN humanitarian chief, hundreds of thousands would die in the event of humanitarian collapse.

But most consequentially, to ignore ongoing genocidal realities in Darfur confers upon the Khartoum regime "moral equivalence" with the rebel groups - and emboldens the regime to cleave to the disastrous Darfur Peace Agreement as the only basis for further negotiations.

Since the rebels - and the majority of Darfuris - emphatically reject the peace agreement, a diplomatic standoff looms, which will continue until Khartoum is held accountable by the international community. So long as the regime's génocidaires are simply another party at the negotiating table - not orchestrators of the ultimate human crime - there will be no diplomatic progress toward a just peace.

Darfur: Rebel Chief Criticises New State Negotiator

From Reuters

A Darfur rebel leader branded as "arrogant" on Thursday the Sudanese government's new chief negotiator for the strife-torn western region, saying the appointment would make upcoming peace talks difficult.

Khartoum named Nafie Ali Nafie, a close presidential adviser, as its chief Darfur negotiator on Wednesday.

Khalil Ibrahim, leader of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), told Reuters: "He does not believe in justice and equality between people in Sudan -- it makes the coming peace talks difficult."

"I do not believe he can make a fair agreement that is acceptable to the people," Ibrahim said.

Nafie was not available for a comment. He replaces Majzoub al-Khalifa, widely seen as a government hardliner, who died in a car accident in June.

The United Nations and African Union expect to send out invitations soon to the various Darfur rebel leaders for peace negotiations with the government widely expected in October.

Ibrahim went on to criticise Nafie's knowledge of the region, saying "he has no insight about the suffering of the people of Darfur".

International experts estimate that some 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been displaced during the past 4-1/2 years of fighting in Darfur, which erupted when rebels took up arms against the government complaining of marginalisation. Sudan puts the death toll from the conflict at 9,000.

Another prominent Darfur rebel leader, Abdel Wahid Mohammed Nur -- founder of the Sudan Liberation Movement -- said it didn't matter to him who the government chose as its Darfur point man.

"We don't care who is appointed," Nur said, adding that his group was only concerned about the issues up for discussion.

Nur refused to sign a 2006 peace deal negotiated by Nafie's predecessor al-Khalifa. Nur has said he will not participate in a fresh round of peace talks between the government and rebel groups unless a string of conditions are met.

Abu Bakr Mohammed Kado, a field commander with the Sudan Liberation Army Unity faction, said he was hoping for progress in upcoming talks.

"We hope that it will not be a long-drawn-out process," he said. But he also questioned the government's seriousness in resolving the conflict peacefully.

"Just yesterday they were bombing in Haskina (in eastern Darfur)," he said.

Darfur/Chad: Former UN Human Rights Head Says Ceasefire Urgent

From DPA

Securing a ceasefire between warring factions along the border region between western Sudanese Darfur and neighbouring Chad is urgent, former UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson said Thursday. Robinson was detailing the suffering primarily of women in refugee camps inside Chad at a press conference in Berlin after a four-day trip to the region as part of a women's delegation.

The former Irish president said momentum was building both within the European Union and the United Nations for increased international involvement.

"But sometimes we forget how urgent it is. The greatest urgency is for a ceasefire," she said.

Robinson said that, despite her broad experience of suffering, "I have been more affected by what we heard from these women than almost anything before."

The women she had interviewed had spoken of food shortages, poor housing and lack of schooling beyond primary level, she said. "Women there were so undernourished they could not feed their babies."

"But security is the priority. They are not safe in the camps."

Flanked by former German justice minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, current chairwoman of the human rights and humanitarian aid commission of the German parliament, Robinson spoke of a profusion of warring factions.

Undisciplined elements within the Chadian security forces were part of the problem, she said.

Both women called for greater international effort to train, equip and pay for policing in the camp, stressing the need for women officers to be part of the police force.

"The women there are terrified of men in uniform," Robinson said.

Daeubler-Gmelin warned that the conflict in the region was in imminent danger of spilling over into the Central African Republic and warned of a "failed zone" in the region if the international community did not act.

She warned that some time would elapse before a UN-African Union "hybrid force" - approved by the Security Council on July 31 - would be in place. For this reason the international community had to become active.

Robinson and Daeubler-Gmelin were part of an eight-member delegation of prominent women, five of them from Africa, that visited the camps in Chad at the beginning of this month.

Following visits to Paris and Berlin, they were to travel to London and New York.

Darfur: China's Envoy Visits U.S.

From the AP

China's special envoy on the troubled Darfur region is visiting the United States to explain Beijing's position on Sudan to lawmakers and show business personalities, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Thursday.

Envoy Liu Guijing began a visit to the United States and the U.N. this week to communicate Beijing's position on Darfur, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said.

Along with government officials, lawmakers and reporters, Liu would meet with "people from the entertainment circle," Jiang told a news conference.

The ministry said it did not have Liu's detailed schedule and didn't know which entertainers he would meet, but said he would make a statement on his return next week.

China has been accused by Hollywood actress Mia Farrow and other show business people of impeding a solution to deadly ethnic conflicts in Darfur because of its oil interests in Sudan.

Li's U.S. visit comes as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is visiting the Darfur region as part of a push to end the protracted conflict, which has killed more than 200,000 people and created more than 2.5 million refugees.

Jiang defended China's role in Darfur and said Beijing appreciated Ban's efforts and "supports the U.N. to play an important role in the issue."

"On the Darfur issue, the Chinese government has been playing a positive and constructive role," Jiang said.

China claims its influence with Khartoum is limited and argues that helping the country's economy develop is the best way to end poverty and chaos.

China had earlier lashed out at activists such as Farrow who have sought to raise public awareness on Darfur by linking Beijing's ties with Sudan to its staging of next year's Olympic Summer Games.

Olympic opening ceremonies consultant Steven Spielberg urged Chinese President Hu Jintao to change China's Sudan policy after Farrow also criticized the U.S. movie director.

Farrow, a U.N. goodwill ambassador, has labeled the Beijing Games the "genocide Olympics" and has launched an Olympic-style torch relay through countries with histories of mass atrocities.

Chad: Ban to Push for Peacekeepers

From VOA

While attention is focused on United Nations peacekeeper deployment in Sudan and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's visit there, analysts say getting peacekeepers into neighboring Chad is just as critical to stabilize the region. Phuong Tran has more from VOA's Central and West Africa Bureau in Dakar.

Ban Ki-moon is expected in Chad, Friday, to discuss getting U.N.-European Union peacekeepers into Chad to protect victims taking refuge in camps from fighting in Sudan, Chad and Central African Republic.

Chad President Idriss Deby had long resisted foreign peacekeepers in his country. He agreed only when the United Nations scaled back its peacekeeping role to that of administration.

EU forces, expected to come mostly from France, will patrol the troubled eastern border with Sudan, where the camps are located.

Francois Grignon, the Kenya-based director of International Crisis Group's Africa Programs, says Sudan may try to block deployment, saying foreign troops will only worsen tension from local conflicts.

After resisting earlier U.N. peacekeeping attempts, Sudan recently agreed to accept 26,000 United Nations and African Union peacekeepers to quell on-going violence from its four-year interethnic conflict.

Grignon says Sudan may leverage this force to block the peacekeeping operation in Chad.

"That is a way to basically blackmail, politically, the international community to say, if you deploy a hostile force, if you deploy foreign troops in Chad, we will not accept to go with what has been agreed upon in Darfur," he said.

Sudanese officials have questioned the necessity of foreign troops in Chad, calling the plan premature. They say the United Nations should have waited to see the impact of peacekeeping in Sudan.

But Mr. Ban's spokeswoman, Michelle Montas, says Sudan's leadership has not shown any signs of resistance to peacekeeping in Chad during the first part of the secretary general's visit.

"The reaction of the Sudanese government has been a very positive one and we have no reason to be worried or concerned," she said.

Aid workers have long called for more protection of Chad's camps. They say armed groups have recruited children living in the camps; looted surrounding communities; and raped women in and near the camps.

There are less than 250 Chad troops watching over about 400,000 Sudanese and Central African refugees and displaced Chadians, living in 12 camps in eastern and southern Chad.

Last month, the European Union sent a delegation to Chad to plan how many peacekeepers it will send, and to determine from which countries. The U.N. Security Council has given preliminary approval for the deployment.

Darfur: Ban Meets Sudan Leaders

From Reuters

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met Sudanese officials on Thursday for talks focusing on planned peace negotiations over war-ravaged Darfur and arrangements for a massive peacekeeping force to go there.

Ban, who was to see President Omar Hassan al-Bashir later in the day, had morning appointments with top government ministers, parliamentarians and Minni Arcua Minnawi, leader of a Darfur rebel faction that signed a peace deal with Khartoum in 2006.

Ban said on Wednesday he was close to announcing a date and venue for talks between Khartoum and some eight rebel groups over the future of Darfur, where an insurgency erupted in 2003 over alleged government neglect of the west Sudanese region.

Since then, some 200,000 people have died and more than 2 million have been driven from their homes in Darfur, according to estimates by international experts. The Sudanese government says only 9,000 have died.

In July, The U.N. Security Council approved a plan for 26,000 U.N. and African Union peacekeepers to go to Darfur in one of the largest such operations in history. They would take over from an ineffectual AU force of less than 6,000 soldiers.

Ban, who arrived in Khartoum on Monday as part of a six-day regional tour, had a dinner meeting that day with Bashir and later said the Sudanese leader was backing both the negotiations and the peacekeeping mission.

The U.N. chief has said the U.N.-AU force cannot be effective unless "there is a peace to keep" -- highlighting the importance of the planned talks which he has already said he would like to see start some time next month.

Ban has also said the force is dependent on the practical cooperation of Sudanese authorities. Western diplomats say it remains to be seen whether this will be forthcoming when the troops are on the ground.

On Wednesday, Ban visited a refugee camp near the North Darfur capital of El Fasher, where he was mobbed by thousands of cheering people who see the United Nations as a way out of their plight. He visited autonomous south Sudan on Tuesday.

Later in the week he will travel on to Chad and Libya, neighbors of Sudan who U.N. officials say are key to resolving the Darfur issue, partly because of their influence over some of the groups there.

Darfur: Ban 'Shocked and Humbled'

From the AP

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was "shocked and humbled" by a visit to a Darfur refugee camp, where thousands cheered him as he pledged to step up efforts to bring peace to the war-torn region.

But the enthusiastic welcome from refugees at the Al Salaam camp on Wednesday was tempered by the earlier disruption of a meeting at a U.N. compound with camp representatives, and by a small protest against the upcoming deployment of U.N. troops in a new 26,000-strong peacekeeping force in Darfur.

The secretary-general brushed aside the protests, saying he understands the frustrations of the millions uprooted from their homes, and he pointed to the huge crowds that had come to see him in Darfur and in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, on his first trip to the country since taking the reins of the United Nations on Jan. 1.

"They really wanted to see some hope from me, from the United Nations, from the international community," he said.

But Wednesday's incidents had an impact. Ban met with only three of the 30 camp representatives, his scheduled one-hour visit to Al Salaam was cut to 20 minutes, and the media pool accompanying him was cut from 37 to 5 because of security concerns.

As Ban's convoy rolled into the camp, home to 46,000 Darfur refugees, thousands chanted "Welcome! Welcome Ban Ki-moon!"

"We must bring peace and development. We must protect human rights. We must help all of you return to your homes and lands," Ban told the crowd.

Later, he told reporters: "I was so shocked and humbled. ... I was shocked at the poverty and hardship all these tens of thousands of people were undergoing."

Ban promised to step up efforts to end the protracted conflict that has killed more than 200,000 people and left more than 2.5 million displaced, and he urged the world to be more sympathetic to the millions whose lives have been uprooted.

"I really urge the international community to help them return to their homes and land, give them a sense of security and bring peace as soon as possible. We must bring enduring peace, durable peace and security here," he said.

Ban said he would raise these issues, and the protest, during a second round of talks Thursday with Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir.

The scene at the camp contrasted with Ban's visit earlier Wednesday to the U.N. compound in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.

Ban told reporters there was "some serious concern" when an univited group of men and women tried to push through the door to participate in the meeting with representatives of three camps for people uprooted from their homes. Security is exceedingly tight in Sudan, and it is unclear how they got so close to the secretary-general.

"We don't care for UN! This is our country!" a group of bejeweled women in high heels shouted in Arabic at the gates of the U.N. compound, in what appeared to be an orchestrated event. "You want to destroy us! We will not allow you here in Darfur!"

In recent weeks, the Sudanese government has stepped up a campaign to have Darfurians in the camps voluntarily return home. But a key concern keeping the millions of refugees from leaving the camps is lack of security -- a main reason for the deployment of the U.N.-African Union force.

During Ban's stop at the compound of the North Darfur governor, a man who identified himself to the Sudanese media as Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed gave Ban a letter urging the United Nations to help returning Darfur refugees resettle in their original villages.

North Darfur Governor Mohamed Kebir told reporters "many conditions are now ripe" for the voluntary return of people to their villages.

Ban said security was improving -- but he told reporters there still is not full security and peace in Darfur so "we must continue to protect (the displaced) and provide the security," especially in the camps.

Despite speculation it would be called off, the secretary-general's brief visit to the Al Salaam camp went under tight security, but U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said there were reports of some violent clashes afterward, though she had no details.

At every opportunity, the secretary-general stressed the importance of reaching a political settlement and deploying the AU-U.N. hybrid force quickly.

He said the planned deployment of the hybrid force was now on a "good track" and "it is crucially important that a political negotiation process start now."

Ban said he will shortly announce the venue and date for new negotiations, likely in October.

AU officials who briefed Ban on Wednesday said they told him the beleaguered AU force now in Darfur has less then 6,000 peacekeepers deployed in a region nearly the size of France -- down from its authorized strength of 7,000. AU officials said the groundwork for deploying the hybrid force is on schedule, but it is not expected to start arriving in Darfur until early next year.

Sudan: Gov't States It Has Drones, Pursuing Missiles

From Reuters

Sudan has developed unmanned surveillance planes, is developing missiles, and is now "self-sufficient" in conventional weapons, a Sudanese state news agency reported.

The rare public announcement on Sudan's military capability gave no details on how far missile development had progressed or where the surveillance drones might be used.

International commentators were sceptical about the scope of its statements, and no one was available for comment from the Ministry of Defence on Wednesday.

"Sudan's defence minister has revealed that his country has successfully developed unmanned surveillance planes," the state-run Sudanese Media Centre said in a report on Tuesday.

"The minister of defence, Lt-Gen Abdel-Rahim Mohamed Hussein, told reporters that Sudan is now self sufficient in conventional weapons and is also in the process of developing missiles."

Hussein was quoted as telling journalists that Sudan had received imports of military technology from Russia, Belarus, Korea, Iran, China, Indonesia and Malaysia and had signed deals with China and Russia to modernise its air force.

"We are the number three country in Africa as far as manufacturing military equipment after Egypt and South Africa," Hussein was quoted as saying.

International commentators said Sudan might be trying to send a message to the organisers of the promised 26,000-strong U.N. and African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur that Khartoum was capable of monitoring their movements.

Experts estimate 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from homes in more than four years of fighting in the western Darfur region.

The government puts the death toll from that conflict -- sparked when rebel groups took up arms against Khartoum accusing it of neglect -- at 9,000.

Stephen Morrison, Africa programme director at the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said there could be some credibility to Sudan's stating it had drones but he added the real question was the announcement's timing.

"They may be trying to send a message that they have the capacity to view what is going on on the ground. They are hyper sensitive about the entrance of U.N. forces in Darfur, particularly their air capacity," he said.

But Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential newsletter, said the self-sufficiency statement sounded like "internal bluster" designed to create the impression Sudan's military could survive arms embargoes.

"There is no doubt that Sudan has a military capacity, but there is a lot of doubt about how sophisticated it is," he said.

Darfur: War Crimes Suspect Leads Sudan Rights Probe

From Reuters

Rights activists on Wednesday criticised a move by Sudan's government and its main political partner to authorise a committee headed by a Darfur war crimes suspect to investigate human rights complaints.

The committee was initially set up by the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) of former southern rebels to monitor the security situation between the country's north and south.

Ann Itto, a co-chair of the committee, said Ahmed Haroun would help launch its new initiative to probe human rights violations in Darfur, a role approved by both parties at the weekend.

Haroun, a junior minister from the NCP, is one of two people accused by the International Criminal Court of committing war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region.

The committee, comprised of representatives from the ruling party and former southern rebels who in 2005 signed a peace deal with Khartoum to end over two decades of north-south civil war, will investigate rights infractions raised by either side.

Opposition politicians said they were outraged that Haroun was heading the committee.

"By allowing Haroun to co-chair this committee, Sudan wants to send the signal that it does not recognise the decision of the ICC," said Kamal Omar, a lawyer and human rights activist.

He said Haroun's presence on the committee means it will have "no credibility", and added that it further demonstrated the ruling party's disregard for human rights.

The Hague-based ICC issued a warrant for Haroun's arrest in March, and has accused him of conspiring with a pro-government militia commander who prosecutors said led attacks on towns and villages where dozens were killed.

The ICC has also accused Haroun, formerly a state interior minister who now holds a humanitarian affairs portfolio, of recruiting and arming local militias to combat Darfur rebels.

International experts estimate 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes in the past 4-1/2 years of conflict. Khartoum puts the death toll at 9,000.

Sudan's government has refused to act on the warrants for Haroun and the commander, saying there was no evidence and that Sudan, like the United States, was not an ICC signatory.

A spokesman for the SPLM said it was "unfortunate" that Haroun was sharing leadership of the committee with them.

"This is a mockery of justice. It would have been better not to form this commission," SPLM spokesman Samson Kwaje said. "They are making a joke out of it. They are not serious."

Itto, Haroun's SPLM co-chair on the committee, said her party had no right to reject Haroun's role on the committee.

Darfur: Crowds Mob U.N. Chief/Protests Disrupt Visit

From Reuters

Thousands of displaced Sudanese mobbed U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon as he visited their camp in the troubled Darfur region on a tour aimed at pressing for a political solution to the festering conflict.

Ban's convoy drove at speed through al-Salam camp in North Darfur state but stopped to let him address the crowds, who chanted "Welcome Ban Ki-moon" and waved banners supporting a rebel chief.

Dressed in open-necked shirt and blue U.N. baseball camp, the U.N. secretary-general told people at a water point: "We must bring peace and development. We must protect human rights. We must help all of you return to your homes and land."

Ban told journalists on the trip he had made good progress in organising a date and venue for long-promised peace talks expected to take place in October between the government of Sudan and Darfur's splintered rebel groups.

"I am really going to step up this political negotiation process," Ban said, adding that he wanted to build the foundations for the deployment of a 26,000-strong "hybrid" force of U.N. and African Union peacekeepers.

"The hybrid troop process should be accompanied by a political process. Otherwise our peacekeepers or police or civilian workers will have a lot of difficulty in carrying out their roles," he said.

UN officials said Ban's trip to al-Salam camp had been so quick because his security team had been unnerved by two disruptions to his visit earlier in the day.

The secretary-general was handed a petition by a small group claiming to represent people displaced by the conflict, calling for Ban to support a government-backed policy to encourage displaced Darfuris to return to their villages.

Most displaced groups in Darfur have opposed this policy, saying continued hostilities would make returning too hazardous.

Ban's meeting with leaders of displaced groups in state capital El Fasher was disrupted when 20 people tried to force their way in, claiming to represent other displaced communities. They were ejected and the meeting was moved to another venue.

Ban later played down the incidents, telling journalists: "You cannot expect all four million internally displaced persons to have the same views."

Most of the refugees who greeted Ban appeared to be supporters of the founder of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army, Abdel Wahed Mohamed el-Nur, who has said he will not go to talks until an international force is in place.

African Union troops held back the crowds who waved banners bearing Abdel Wahed's portrait and the messages: "No violence in the camps" and "Disarm the Janjaweed", referring to the popular name for militias blamed for much of the violence in Darfur.

Ban at one point stopped at a UNICEF-funded water tower, underlining his belief that water shortages linked to global warming are one of the factors behind the conflict.

He met officials from the African Union Mission in Sudan, the force the hybrid troops will replace when they arrive.

They said they briefed him on serious underfunding of the mission, adding that while the official strength of the AU force in Darfur is 7,000, there are now 5,915 troops on the ground.

International experts estimate some 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes during the past 4-1/2 years of fighting in Darfur.

Sudan puts the death toll from the conflict, which flared when rebel groups took up arms against the government charging it with neglect, at 9,000.

A senior U.N. official travelling with Ban said there had been progress in finalising arrangements to fly a sick Darfur rebel out of Sudan to receive medical treatment in Kenya.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir gave Ban a pledge on Monday that Suleiman Jamous would be able to leave effective house arrest as soon as arrangements could be made.

"He has a new passport and we are in the process of getting him a Kenyan visa," the official said.

In Khartoum on Wednesday, a government-backed militia blamed for much of the violence in Darfur said it would accept the hybrid force as long as it stays within its mandate.

The Popular Defence Forces, a paramilitary force used to reinforce the armed forces during times of war, vowed last year to treat any U.N. force in Darfur as an invading army that would be in a state of war with Khartoum.

Its announcement on Wednesday brings its position into line with that of the government, which agreed to the force in July after long negotiations over the details.

From the AP

Protesters shouted at Ban Ki Moon during the UN secretary general's visit Wednesday to Darfur, raising security fears during a trip designed to give Ban a chance to meet some of the 2.5 million people living in refugee camps because of violence in this western Sudanese region.

Ban's planned meeting at a compound of the UN mission in Sudan with representatives from three refugee camps was disrupted by an uninvited group of a dozen people, mostly women, claiming to represent the real Darfur.

"We don't care for UN! This is our country!" the women shouted in Arabic. "You want to destroy us. We will not allow you here in Darfur."

It was not immediately clear who the protesters were, but the incident underlined the difficulties the United Nations faces in deploying peacekeepers here.

Ban has promised to step up efforts to end a conflict that has killed more than 200,000 people and he has urged the world to be more sympathetic to the millions whose lives have been uprooted.

Ban was scheduled to meet the governor of North Darfur, Mohamed Kebir, upon arrival at the heavily guarded El Fasher airport, but their meeting was rescheduled for the governor's compound. There, a crowd of pro-government demonstrators merged with officials at a colorful reception with dancing and singing.

A man who identified himself to the Sudanese media as Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed gave Ban a letter saying that Darfur refugees have been receiving what they need from the government but need help from the United Nations to return to their original villages.

"We are being helped by the state party," said some who claimed they were from the large refugee camps that circle El Fasher, North Darfur's state capital.

Neither the letter nor the demonstrators mentioned the key concern keeping the millions of refugees from leaving the camps: the lack of security, which is a major reason for the deployment of a UN and African Union peacekeeping force.

When Kebir was asked after his meeting with Ban whether the government was anxious to get people home and what security guarantees could be given to those who leave the overcrowded camps, he said, "Many conditions are now ripe" for people to return to their villages.

Later, after the disruption by the clamoring women during Ban's stop at the UN compound where he was supposed to meet camp representatives, "security precautions had to be taken," said a UN deputy spokeswoman, Marie Okabe, and Ban left the area.

Darfur: Chaos Rises as Arabs Fight With Arabs

From the New York Times

Some of the same Arab tribes accused of massacring civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan are now unleashing their considerable firepower against one another in a battle over the spoils of war that is killing hundreds of people and displacing tens of thousands.

In the past several months, the Terjem and the Mahria, heavily armed Arab tribes that United Nations officials said raped and pillaged together as part of the region’s notorious janjaweed militias, have squared off in South Darfur, fighting from pickup trucks and the backs of camels. They are raiding each other’s villages, according to aid workers and the fighters themselves, and scattering Arab tribesmen into the same kinds of displacement camps that still house some of their earlier victims.

United Nations officials said that thousands of gunmen from each side, including some from hundreds of miles away, were pouring into a strategic river valley called Bulbul, while clashes between two other Arab tribes, the Habanniya and the Salamat, were intensifying farther south.

Darfur’s violence has often been characterized as government-backed Arab tribes slaughtering non-Arab tribes, but this new Arab-versus-Arab dimension seems to be a sign of the evolving complexity of the crisis. What started out four years ago in western Sudan as a rebellion and brutal counterinsurgency has cracked wide open into a fluid, chaotic, confusing free-for-all with dozens of armed groups, a spike in banditry and chronic attacks on aid workers.

United Nations officials said tribal and factional fighting was killing more people than the battles between government and rebel forces, which, except in a few areas, have declined considerably.

Though the recent round of clashes between the splintering groups has not come close to taking as many lives as the thousands who were dying each month during the height of the conflict in 2003 and 2004, many aid officials say they fear that the situation is getting out of control.

“The fragmentation of armed groups is among our major concerns,” said Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Sudan. “This is making the situation even more complex, and more difficult for civilians as well as for humanitarians trying to help them.”

The rising insecurity is spelled out in two color-coded maps taped to Mr. Giuliano’s wall in Khartoum, the capital. One is from May 2006 and has only a few pockets of orange and yellow danger zones. But on the map from this June, the danger zones are everywhere.

United Nations officials say the militias may be jockeying for power and trying to seize turf before the long-awaited hybrid force of United Nations and African Union peacekeepers begins to arrive, perhaps later this year. Today’s battlefields are superimposed on yesterday’s, with the Arab militias killing one another over the same burned villages and stingy riverbeds where so much blood has already been spilled.

Though many Western diplomats and a seemingly endless supply of advocates have blamed the Sudanese government for arming Arab militias in the first place, an accusation the government denies, several independent observers in Sudan said the government was not driving this phase of the conflict.

“The government is no longer arming the janjaweed,” said Col. James Oladipo, the African Union commander in Nyala, in South Darfur. The problem now, he said, is “bandits and factions.”

Some aid workers say Darfur is beginning to resemble Somalia, the world’s longest-running showcase for AK-47-fed chaos. Highwaymen in green camouflage — rebel fighters? local militia? janjaweed? — routinely flag down trucks and drag out passengers, robbing the men and sexually assaulting the women. Newly empowered warlords are exacting taxes. The galaxy of rebel armies — the Greater Sudan Liberation Movement, the Popular Forces Troops, the Sudan Democratic Group, to name a few new arrivals — keeps expanding, and ideology seems to fade away. Despite peace talks among them in early August, the rebels, mostly non-Arabs, are now also battling themselves.

Among Arabs, one of the most egregious examples of the recent infighting happened on the morning of July 31 near Sania Daleibah, in southern Darfur. Terjem leaders said hundreds of Terjem had gathered to bury an important sheik. Then they were suddenly surrounded. It was Mahria tribesmen, and according to United Nations reports and witness accounts, the Mahria opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades and belt-fed machine guns and mowed down more than 60 Terjem.

“It was a massacre,” said Mohammed Yacob Ibrahim Abdelrahman, the top Terjem leader. “By our brothers.”

The Arab-Arab violence is impeding the slow recovery process that had begun in some parts of Darfur. Around 2.2 million people are stuck in displaced persons camps, though some had been taking the first steps to leave, like villagers from Jimaiza, north of Nyala, who left their camp in July to go back to plant their peanut fields. They were not worried about Arab militias raiding their village, they said. Those days seemed over. But then the Terjem-Mahria feud erupted.

“It was strange,” said Abakar Ahmed Abdul Rahman, a leader of the Fur tribe, which is non-Arab and the biggest in Darfur. “A few days after the fighting, a Mahria elder came up to me and said: ‘Tell your people not to go back to the camp. They’re safe in the village. We don’t have a problem with you.’ ”

But Mr. Abakar shook his head and laughed.

“I know these people,” he said. “They killed my wife and burned my hut. I’ll never trust them.”

Darfur: UN Plans to End Fighting Will Fail, Rebel Leader Says

From Bloomberg

Sudanese rebel leader Abdel Wahid Nur said current United Nations plans to end the four-year conflict in the western region of Darfur are doomed to fail.

Nur, 39, said he won't join peace negotiations between the government and the insurgents the UN is planning to sponsor this year until the authorities in Khartoum halt attacks on civilians and disarm their militia allies, known as the Janjaweed.

``I am very sure that unfortunately this process is going to complicate and increase the suffering of our people,'' Nur said yesterday in an interview. ``I am here with you today in Paris, while my people are being killed, raped and terrorized.''

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, on a weeklong visit to Sudan, Chad and Libya, is scheduled to travel to Darfur today after calling for an immediate cease-fire and peace talks between the government and the rebels. The UN and the African Union are planning to deploy a 26,000-member peacekeeping force this year to halt a war that has killed 200,000 people.

``The AU and the UN want to put me in a position that I am an obstacle to peace,'' he said. ``We want peace first, we want security'' before negotiations start.

Nur boycotted talks to unify Darfur's rebel factions in Arusha, Tanzania, last month organized by the UN and the African Union and said that many of the faction leaders who attended are interested in jobs and ``peace for themselves.''

A founding member and first president of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement in 2002, Nur has been living in exile in Paris since he left Eritrea in 2006. When asked when he may return to Darfur, he rolled up his left shirt sleeve and exposed the right side of his chest to show scars of bullet wounds.

He remains popular in the Darfur refugee camps that house about 2 million people and said he's in daily contact with camp leaders. His decision not to sign a peace agreement with the government last year, even though he was prodded by Western diplomats such as former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, led to the accord's collapse.

Nur rejected that agreement, signed by his rival in the SLM, Minni Minnawi, arguing that it did not provide enough guarantees for disarmament of the Janjaweed militia, compensation for the victims of war and political representation for Darfurians.

``He believes he retains support as a rejectionist, and given how poorly the negotiations have unfolded, he is right,'' John Prendergast, an analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said in an e-mailed response to questions. ``It will be very hard to get him back into a negotiations process.''

President Umar al-Bashir's government says it is ready to start peace talks with the rebels. Ban said the government told him it will allow the SLM's humanitarian aid coordinator, Suleiman Jamous, to leave a UN hospital in central Sudan and travel to Kenya for medical treatment.

Some analysts say Nur's opposition to the new UN plans for peace talks shows he is losing relevance and may threaten his popularity.

``His people are pressing him to get moving quickly and join the peace talks before he is sidelined,'' former African Union adviser Alex de Waal, co-author of ``Darfur: A Short History of a Long War,'' said in an e-mailed response to questions.

The conflict in Darfur started in February 2003 when the SLM, demanding a greater share of Sudan's political power and oil revenue, began attacking government forces.

The authorities in Khartoum responded by dispatching troops and arming militias to attack villages of Darfur's main African tribes, the Massaleit, Zaghawa, and Nur's own Fur people.

Nur says that in recent months the government has brought in Arabs from neighboring countries such as Chad and Niger to settle in areas vacated by civilians fleeing the violence.

``The government wants to create a new demography in Darfur, he says. ``It is 100-plus one percent genocide, massive killing, massive rape against civilians, massive burning of villages.''

Nur professed hope that the international community will help to end the Darfur conflict, and said it needed to act as it did in Kosovo when it forcibly halted fighting before starting peace negotiations.

``If humanity has no borders, if humanity has no white and black, it is time for the international community to act like that,'' he said.

He also said he was confident that Darfur's Arab and African populations could one day live in peace.

``Some of them will never forget this, someone who has had his wife or mother killed, so it won't happen overnight,'' he said. ``Without reconciliation there won't even be Darfur.''

While Nur aspires to become president of Sudan one day, he ruled out participating in 2009 parliamentary and presidential elections because he says they won't be free and fair.

His ultimate aim is the downfall of the Bashir government.

``This is our final goal, because there is no Sudan if this regime is in power,'' he said.

Darfur: Ban Urges Political Progress

From Reuters

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon arrived in the Darfur region of western Sudan on Wednesday, promising to step up pressure for a political solution to the festering conflict.

Ban told journalists he would push for progress in peace talks between the Sudanese government and rebel groups, while laying the ground for deployment of a 26,000-strong "hybrid" force of U.N. and African Union peacekeepers.

"I am really going to step up this political negotiation process," Ban said just before arriving in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state.

"The hybrid troop process should be accompanied by a political process. Otherwise our peacekeepers or police or civilian workers will have a lot of difficulty in carrying out their roles," he said.

He added there had been some progress in organising peace talks with Darfur's splintered rebel groups. "As far as the political negotiation process and coordination, we are coming close to agreeing on a venue and a date. I hope I will be able to finalise negotiations very soon."

International experts estimate some 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes during 4-1/2 years of fighting in Darfur.

Sudan puts the death toll from the conflict, which flared when rebel groups took up arms against the government, charging it with neglect, at 9,000.

Ban was greeted at the airport by officials and a small group of women carrying banners urging rebel groups who refuse to sign up to last year's troubled Darfur Peace Agreement to attend the coming negotiations.

These are widely expected to be held in October.

A senior U.N. official travelling with Ban said there had been progress in finalising arrangements to fly a sick Darfur rebel out of Sudan to receive medical treatment in Kenya.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir gave Ban a pledge on Monday that the rebel official, Suleiman Jamous, would be able to leave effective house arrest as soon as arrangements could be made. "He has a new passport and we are in the process of getting him a Kenyan visa," said the official.

Late on Tuesday, Sudanese state media reported that Bashir had appointed his close advisor Nafie Ali Nafie as the government's new chief negotiator for Darfur.

Nafie Ali Nafie replaces the formidable Dr Majzoub al-Khalifa, who died in a car crash on the way to a family funeral in June.

The international aid group Oxfam on Wednesday called on Ban to press the Sudanese government for an immediate ceasefire in Darfur.

Mohammed Elmi, Oxfam's Regional Programme Manager, said: "One month after a UN Resolution called for an immediate cessation of hostilities, its demands are falling on deaf ears.

"If his visit is to be a success, the secretary-general must send an unequivocal message to those responsible that the violence and lawlessness in Darfur must end immediately."

Last week, Ban sketched out a three-point approach to Darfur: deployment of the 26,000 U.N. and African Union troops and police, approved by the Security Council in July, peace talks tentatively scheduled for October, and aid.

But these came against a background of reports of renewed conflict in the region.