Sudan approves deal with UN as parties to meet over Darfur

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said on Friday that the Sudanese government has finalized an agreement it reached Wednesday with the United Nations on steps to disarm in the next 30 days the Arab militia accused of attacking black Africans in the troubled western Darfur region.

The agreement will be made public after it is officially signed on Monday by UN special representative for Sudan Jan Pronk and Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail, Eckhard said.

The deal, struck on Wednesday night by Pronk and Ismail, also commits Khartoum to improving security in and around the camps for the estimated 1.2 million internally displaced people in Darfur.

Eckhard said the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is planning to deploy eight observers to Darfur over the next few days to monitor the disarmament process.

Meanwhile, the Sudanese government and two rebel groups in the Darfur region will hold peace talks in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Aug. 23.

The talks, which will be organized by the African Union (AU), are cited as part of the AU efforts aimed at achieving a political solution to the conflict in Darfur, said an AU press release on Saturday.

The first round of political talks last month between the Sudanese government and the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army collapsed after the movements set six conditions before a political dialogue with the government could take place.

The movements said that unless the government accepted the conditions for political dialogue, they would never sit down for any other political dialogue.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who is also the AU chairman, and Alpha Oumar Konare, chairperson of the AU Commission, then began a series of consultations with the Sudanese parties to fix the venue and date of a later meeting.

Arab foreign ministers also planned to convene an emergency meeting on Sunday to discuss how to contain the crisis in Darfur.

During the gathering, the participants will review the latest developments in the Darfur situation after a UN Security Council resolution on the Darfur issue and try to form a unified Arab stance on the issue.

The AU, which had previously decided to dispatch an observer mission to Darfur, reportedly planned to send 2,000 troops with a mandate to protect the observers as well as serve as a peacekeeping force there.

However, Sudanese Interior Minister Abdel Rehim Mohamed Hussein said on Saturday that the AU has not told Sudan of any plan to deploy the African troops in Darfur and that the Sudanese government reserves the right to reject such a plan.

Sudan will not allow the deployment on its land of peacekeeping forces from any countries, including those of Africa and Europe, the minister said.

Any AU decision concerning Darfur should be approved by the Sudanese government, otherwise, it will be meaningless, he added.

A revolt against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government broke out among indigenous ethnic minorities in Darfur in February 2003. Pro-government Arab militias there are blamed for a wave of killings of indigenous people.

More than 10,000 people have died in the region and more than a million others have been driven from their homes since then.

Source: Xinhua