Rebels 'to extend war zone'

2004-05-17 12:51

Cairo - The head of the main rebel force in Sudan's Darfur region has threatened to extend a war affecting more than a million people to other areas if the government refuses to include it in all-round peace talks.

Abdel Wahed Mohammad Ahmad Nour, leader of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) warned that "we will extend the zone of our military operations to encompass Kordofan (in central Sudan), Khartoum and the east" if excluded from Sudanese peace talks entering a critical week in Kenya.

"Any agreement leaving out the SLM will not lead to real peace," Nour added in an interview published on Monday by the Arabic daily al-Hayat, where he also accused pro-government forces of breaching a shaky ceasefire reached last month.

"The government continues to bomb civilian targets from the air, and its militias are burning villages, killing civilians and raping women," the rebel leader said.

Ethnic cleansing

"What's happening in Darfur is ethnic cleansing organised and planned right down to the details by the government," he alleged.

The conflict in the west of Sudan has uprooted a million people from their homes, according to UN figures, and driven 100 000 civilians to seek shelter across the border in impoverished Chad since it broke out in February 2003.

On May 7, the United Nations released a report describing Darfur as a region in the grip of a "reign of terror" where pro-government forces are committing massive human rights violations that may amount to crimes against humanity.

The fighting pits the SLM and the smaller Movement for Justice and Equality (MJE) against government soldiers and armed Arab militias, the Janjaweed, who are the primary targets of accusations of massacring the black, non-Arab peoples of Darfur.

Nour, a lawyer with a degree from the University of Khartoum, said his movement was "seeking autonomy" in Darfur and not to secede. The MLS, he added, represents "all the African tribes of the west as well as Arab tribes".

In the Kenyan town of Naivasha, representatives of the Sudanese government and of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army, which have been fighting mainly in the south for more than two decades, have entered the final phase of lengthy peace talks.

Regional analysts have noted that the Darfur rebel movements do not want to be cut out of any peace and power-sharing deal for the rest of Africa's largest nation, which has oil reserves and is roughly divided into an Arab, Muslim north and a mainly black African south where many of the population are Christians.

- AFP