Renewed violence in Sudan
2005-07-25 10:05
Cairo - The Sudanese government and the main ethnic minority rebel group in Darfur accused each other on Sunday of provoking renewed fighting in the war-ravaged western region.
The rebel Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) accused government troops backed by helicopters of bombing villages in South Darfur state on Friday and again on Sunday.
But armed forces spokesperson general Abbas Abdel Rahman Khalifa insisted it had been the rebels who had been attacking villages on Saturday and Sunday forcing the government to respond.
On high alert
"On July 22, they heavily shelled the village of Al-Hamra and completely destroyed it," said SLM spokesperson Mahjoub Hussein.
"They also bombed three villages in South Darfur state on Sunday," he said, adding that fighting was continuing in the Shengun Tubay area, between El-Fasher and Nyala.
"Our movement is in a state of high alert and we will blame the government for any instability in the area," he warned, demanding immediate action from the United Nations to protect civilians.
But the armed forces spokesperson insisted the rebels had started the fighting with an attack on an army-escorted civilian convoy on the El-Fashir-Nyala road on Saturday, in which an army captain and two soldiers had been killed.
The rebels then "attacked and burned Afaf and other villages which were not related to the convoy", Khalifa said in a statement released in Khartoum.
A swift reaction
The armed forces "were swift in reacting to the incidents on Saturday and Sunday and a battle erupted," the spokesperson said, adding "the role of the air force planes was confined to reconnaissance and instruction".
He said government forces had "not attacked any village except the rebel camps in Hamrah and Linda areas from which the rebels launched their attacks".
The flare-up came as the Sudanese government offered to bring forward by two weeks the scheduled August 24 date for their next round of talks with the rebels in Nigeria.
Violence broke out in Darfur in February 2003 when a rebel uprising led Khartoum to unleash Arab militias known as the Janjaweed in a scorched-earth campaign.
The conflict has claimed between 180 000 and 300 000 lives, displaced around 2.4 million people and sent more than 200 000 fleeing to neighbouring Chad, sparking one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.