posted April 29, 2006 11:41 AM            

Imagine if this was your community?

Please click here Save Darfur to learn more about the terrible situation and to see how you can help. Please spread the word to your friends and families so they can be aware too! We can't rely on the media to cover this important issue enough!

Please also rent the movie, Hotel Rwanda which gives an excellent similar example of the genocide which is occurring.

posted April 29, 2006 03:25 PM              

By Emily Wax
Sunday, April 23, 2006; B03

KOU KOU ANGARANA, Chad

Heard all you need to know about Darfur? Think again. Three years after a government-backed militia began fighting rebels and residents in this region of western Sudan, much of the conventional wisdom surrounding the conflict -- including the religious, ethnic and economic factors that drive it -- fails to match the realities on the ground. Tens of thousands have died and some 2.5 million have been displaced, with no end to the conflict in sight. Here are five truths to challenge the most common misconceptions about Darfur:

1 Nearly everyone is Muslim

Early in the conflict, I was traveling through the desert expanses of rebel-held Darfur when, amid decapitated huts and dead livestock, our SUV roared up to an abandoned green and white mosque, riddled with bullets, its windows shattered.

In my travels, I've seen destroyed mosques all over Darfur. The few men left in the villages shared the same story: As government Antonov jets dropped bombs, Janjaweed militia members rode in on horseback and attacked the town's mosque -- usually the largest structure in town. The strange thing, they said, was that the attackers were Muslim, too. Darfur is home to some of Sudan's most devout Muslims, in a country where 65 percent of the population practices Islam, the official state religion.

A long-running but recently pacified war between Sudan's north and south did have religious undertones, with the Islamic Arab-dominated government fighting southern Christian and animist African rebels over political power, oil and, in part, religion.

"But it's totally different in Darfur," said Mathina Mydin, a Malaysian nurse who worked in a clinic on the outskirts of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur. "As a Muslim myself, I wanted to bring the sides together under Islam. But I quickly realized this war had nothing to do with religion."

2 Everyone is black

Although the conflict has also been framed as a battle between Arabs and black Africans, everyone in Darfur appears dark-skinned, at least by the usual American standards. The true division in Darfur is between ethnic groups, split between herders and farmers. Each tribe gives itself the label of "African" or "Arab" based on what language its members speak and whether they work the soil or herd livestock. Also, if they attain a certain level of wealth, they call themselves Arab.

Sudan melds African and Arab identities. As Arabs began to dominate the government in the past century and gave jobs to members of Arab tribes, being Arab became a political advantage; some tribes adopted that label regardless of their ethnic affiliation. More recently, rebels have described themselves as Africans fighting an Arab government. Ethnic slurs used by both sides in recent atrocities have riven communities that once lived together and intermarried.

"Black Americans who come to Darfur always say, 'So where are the Arabs? Why do all these people look black?' " said Mahjoub Mohamed Saleh, editor of Sudan's independent Al-Ayam newspaper. "The bottom line is that tribes have intermarried forever in Darfur. Men even have one so-called Arab wife and one so-called African. Tribes started labeling themselves this way several decades ago for political reasons. Who knows what the real bloodlines are in Darfur?"

3 It's all about politics

Although analysts have emphasized the racial and ethnic aspects of the conflict in Darfur, a long-running political battle between Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir and radical Islamic cleric Hassan al-Turabi may be more relevant.

A charismatic college professor and former speaker of parliament, Turabi has long been one of Bashir's main political rivals and an influential figure in Sudan. He has been fingered as an extremist; before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks Turabi often referred to Osama bin Laden as a hero. More recently, the United Nations and human rights experts have accused Turabi of backing one of Darfur's key rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement, in which some of his top former students are leaders.

Because of his clashes with Bashir, Turabi is usually under house arrest and holds forth in his spacious Khartoum villa for small crowds of followers and journalists. But diplomats say he still mentors rebels seeking to overthrow the government.

"Darfur is simply the battlefield for a power struggle over Khartoum," said Ghazi Suleiman, a Sudanese human rights lawyer. "That's why the government hit back so hard. They saw Turabi's hand, and they want to stay in control of Sudan at any cost."

4 This conflict is international

China and Chad have played key roles in the Darfur conflict.

In 1990, Chad's Idriss Deby came to power by launching a military blitzkrieg from Darfur and overthrowing President Hissan Habre. Deby hails from the elite Zaghawa tribe, which makes up one of the Darfur rebel groups trying to topple the government. So when the conflict broke out, Deby had to decide whether to support Sudan or his tribe. He eventually chose his tribe.

Now the Sudanese rebels have bases in Chad; I interviewed them in towns full of Darfurians who tried to escape the fighting. Meanwhile, Khartoum is accused of supporting Chad's anti-Deby rebels, who have a military camp in West Darfur. (Sudan's government denies the allegations.) Last week, bands of Chadian rebels nearly took over the capital, N'Djamena. When captured, some of the rebels were carrying Sudanese identification.

Meanwhile, Sudan is China's fourth-biggest supplier of imported oil, and that relationship carries benefits. China, which holds veto power in the U.N. Security Council, has said it will stand by Sudan against U.S. efforts to slap sanctions on the country and in the battle to force Sudan to replace the African Union peacekeepers with a larger U.N. presence. China has built highways and factories in Khartoum, even erecting the Friendship Conference Hall, the city's largest public meeting place.

5 The "genocide" label made it worse

Many of the world's governments have drawn the line at labeling Darfur as genocide. Some call the conflict a case of ethnic cleansing, and others have described it as a government going too far in trying to put down a rebellion.

But in September 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred to the conflict as a "genocide." Rather than spurring greater international action, that label only seems to have strengthened Sudan's rebels; they believe they don't need to negotiate with the government and think they will have U.S. support when they commit attacks. Peace talks have broken down seven times, partly because the rebel groups have walked out of negotiations. And Sudan's government has used the genocide label to market itself in the Middle East as another victim of America's anti-Arab and anti-Islamic policies.

Perhaps most counterproductive, the United States has failed to follow up with meaningful action. "The word 'genocide' was not an action word; it was a responsibility word," Charles R. Snyder, the State Department's senior representative on Sudan, told me in late 2004. "There was an ethical and moral obligation, and saying it underscored how seriously we took this." The Bush administration's recent idea of sending several hundred NATO advisers to support African Union peacekeepers falls short of what many advocates had hoped for.

"We called it a genocide and then we wine and dine the architects of the conflict by working with them on counterterrorism and on peace in the south," said Ted Dagne, an Africa expert for the Congressional Research Service. "I wish I knew a way to improve the situation there. But it's only getting worse."

waxe@washpost.com

posted April 29, 2006 05:46 PM              

POSTED: 4:41 pm CDT April 28, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Five Capitol Hill lawmakers were arrested and handcuffed at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington Friday as they tried to draw attention to the genocide in Sudan.

"The slaughter of the people of Darfur must end, said Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif. The Holocaust survivor spoke from the embassy steps before his arrest.

posted November 08, 2006 06:17 PM              

Sorry George Clooney, but the last thing Darfur needs is western troops

The rebels, not Khartoum, scuppered this year's peace deal - the solution has to be an expanded African Union force

Jonathan Steele
Tuesday September 19, 2006
The Guardian

An air of unreality, if not cant, surrounds the latest upsurge of calls for UN troops to go into Sudan's western region of Darfur. The actor George Clooney takes to the stage at the UN security council, pleading for action. Tony Blair seizes on the issue to write letters to fellow EU leaders. In cities around the world protesters hold a "global day for Darfur" to warn of looming genocide. Is it really possible that western governments, in spite of being burned by their interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, would use force against another Muslim state?

Groups in the west have long campaigned to have the government in Khartoum replaced. In the US the Christian right and some of Israel's friends portray it as an Islamic fundamentalist regime. Human rights activists raise the issue of slavery to suggest that Arab raiders, supported by the government, are routinely abducting Africans from the south to use as human chattel. The Clinton administration listed Sudan as a terrorist-supporting state because Osama bin Laden once lived there.
Against this background it was always going to be hard to expect fair reporting when civil war broke out in Darfur three years ago. The complex grievances that set farmers against nomads was covered with a simplistic template of Arab versus African, even though the region was crisscrossed with tribal and local rivalries that put some villages on the government's side and others against it.

It is true that the government, as often happens in asymmetrical war, overreacted in its use of force when rebels attacked. The so-called janjaweed militias that Khartoum organised and armed did not distinguish between civilians and guerrilla fighters. They burned huts, raped women and put tens of thousands of civilians to flight, forcing them across the border into Chad or into camps inside Darfur. But the rebels also committed atrocities, a fact that was rarely reported since it upset the black-and-white moral image that many editors preferred.

In most wars, governments spin and the media (at least sometimes) seek the truth. Darfur reversed the trend: the media spun while governments were more sophisticated. In spite of efforts to describe the killing in Darfur as genocide, neither the UN nor the EU went along with this description. It was not because of moral myopia, but because they understood the difference between a brutal civil war and a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing. Darfur is not Rwanda. Only the US accepted the genocide description, though this seemed a concession to domestic lobbies rather than a matter of conviction. Washington never followed through with the forcible intervention in Darfur that international law requires once a finding of genocide is made.

Instead, it supported other western governments in encouraging the African Union (AU) to broker peace talks between Khartoum and the rebels. These culminated in May in an agreement that requires the janjaweed to disarm before the rebels do. It also gives Darfur's rebel leaders powers to run the region on their own. Alas, two rebel groups refused to sign. Any fair account of this summer's relapse into war would therefore put most blame on the rebels, whose field commanders recently split into rival groups while their political leaders squabbled in their safe havens in the Eritrean capital, Asmara.

They may have legitimate reasons for arguing that the peace deal did not give enough. Some of the displaced say Khartoum should have to pay families compensation. Others say the peace deal has no enforcement measures and fails to protect people who want to go back to rebuild their villages. But the answer is to conduct more talks, not resume the war. African and western diplomats are trying to get the rebels to think again, but find themselves frustrated by the rebels' feuds. Blair's letter on Darfur was careful to call for pressure on the rebels as well as Khartoum, even though most of the media chose to see it as one-dimensional.

Putting international peace monitors into Darfur to protect the displaced in their camps was vital. Two years ago the Khartoum government accepted this. It allowed the AU to deploy 7,000 troops. But, short of money, helicopters, and other equipment, the AU went along with western governments earlier this year in asking the UN to take over. This is where the debate is now. No one expects that western troops are going to move into Sudan. It has taken weeks to bolster the UN force in Lebanon, while in Afghanistan most Nato members have held back from sending troops into a failing war. In practice, a UN force would be nothing more than the existing AU one with reinforcements, perhaps from India and Bangladesh.

So, behind all the clamour for UN intervention, what is really being discussed is a change in badges. Having AU troops to handle an African problem has symbolic, cultural and political value. But African governments are overstretched, whereas the UN has an established system of subsidising troop- supplying governments. Ironically, given the demands in the US for firm action, it was Congress that recently refused to fund Bush's request for help to the AU.

What of the effort to indict Sudanese leaders before an international court for committing atrocities? Fear of arrest is said to be one reason why Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, has blocked UN troops. Even if a UN force were still 90% African, he might think it could include a western-piloted snatch squad tasked to capture him or his Darfurian lieutenants. If that were the case, the security council resolution that recently called on Khartoum to accept a UN force carefully avoided any reference to international trials. So did an EU statement last week.

In practice, then, there is a good chance that this week's negotiations at the UN will produce a compromise - neither the existing African Union force nor a new UN one, but a hybrid. It could be an AU force with African leadership but under a UN mandate and answerable to the security council. Its contingents might include non-Africans but its mandate would be little different from the current one. After the huffing and puffing of the past few days, this would be a sensible outcome.

Suspicions remain on all sides. Khartoum feels betrayed by the US. After making a peace deal in the south that rules out sharia law and provides for a referendum on secession, it expected US sanctions would be lifted. It felt it had shown it was not fundamentalist or even Islamist since its new government of national unity includes southern Christians and other non-Muslims. As for terrorism, Washington has produced no evidence for a decade.

Meanwhile, many of Khartoum's critics suspect the government has not abandoned its indiscriminate bombing raids and excessive use of force against rebel villages. No foreign peacekeepers, whether AU or UN, can monitor all the vast terrain of Darfur. Sudan's government must discipline its own commanders.

That said, the compromise of an expanded AU force, whether labelled UN or not, is still the best option. The "something must be done" brigade will be upset, but sending foreign troops into Sudan without Khartoum's consent would be nothing short of disaster

posted November 08, 2006 06:53 PM              

Published: Monday, 6 November, 2006, 09:24 AM Doha Time

KULBUS, Sudan: Sudan has failed to disarm proxy militias in Darfur as promised under a May peace deal, and government forces did not act to protect civilians in an attack last week that killed at least 50, a new UN report says.

The attack occurred on October 29 near Jabel Moun, in an area where both rebel and government forces are present.

The report said 26 children were among 50 people killed in militia attacks on at least four villages. It said most of the 7,000 civilians living in the area had fled their homes.

"At the very least, the attacks demonstrated the government of Sudan’s continued failure to disarm militia in Darfur and, at worst, its use of militia forces that target civilians," it said.

The report was prepared by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the basis of witness accounts, and is due to be released shortly.

Arab militias, known locally as Janjaweed, are blamed for a widespread campaign of rape, murder and pillage in Darfur that Washington calls genocide.

Khartoum denies genocide and any link to the Janjaweed, but it does admit having armed some militias during the 3-1/2-year conflict to fight the mostly non-Arab rebels. It denies giving any current support to militias.

Just to the north of where the attacks took place, Janjaweed work together with government forces in the border town of Tine, and share their base. The army calls them border intelligence forces, but the raggedly dressed youths are mostly Arabs from Darfur.

The UN report said authorities had known for a month prior to the attack about a build-up of Arab militias in the area, but took no action to prevent the attack, similar to hundreds of others during a conflict that experts say has killed 200,000 and forced 2.5mn to flee their homes.

"Soldiers at a nearby army base at Goz Mino did not take action to protect the civilians," the report added.

It said witnesses had reported that some of the attackers were wearing new military khaki uniforms, and three of them wore Sudanese armed forces insignia.

Under a peace deal signed in May by only one of three negotiating rebel factions and the government, the government vowed to disarm the Janjaweed by October 22.

But a new alliance of rebels who reject the deal has renewed hostilities.

The report said the international community had to provide more equipment and support to a struggling African Union force that is failing to stem the violence in Darfur. – Reuters

posted November 09, 2006 07:05 AM            

He says the real issue is very confusing....yes, they're both black (By American standards that is) but he's says the attackers consider themselves "Black Arabs". I've read that this ethnic division is probably more linguistic than racial. (Which is actually in one of you're articles.) Secret Garden pointed out to me that the origin of this conflict is much older than once thought....and it was originally agricultural. It was only played out as a racial issue because of Propoganda on both sides.

posted November 09, 2006 07:30 AM            

Sudanese governor says 'renegade' tribesmen killed 33 in West Darfur
KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) -- A Sudanese governor in Darfur on Tuesday accused "renegade Arab tribesmen" of killing 33 people and injuring 17 others in an attack on several villages last month in the war-torn region.

Gaafar Abdul Hakam Isaaq, governor of the West Darfur state, said an inquiry commission he set up to investigate the attacks that occurred on Oct. 29 and 30 reported that a "group of renegade Arab tribesmen attacked six villages ... and looted cattle and properties," according to the official Sudan News Agency.

The United Nations has said 50 people were killed in the deadly raids against several villages and a refugee camp in the Jebel Moon area of West Darfur and charged the Sudanese government-allied janjaweed militia with the killings.

The U.N. cited witnesses saying that men clad in Sudanese military officers' garb were with the horse-mounted militia when they attacked, killing at least 27 children and about as many adults.

But the Sudanese government has denied any involvement in the killings, saying the U.N. allegations contained "huge amounts of lies" and that outlaws should be blamed for the attacks.

The West Darfur governor also said authorities were still searching to locate those involved in the raids.

Sudan's Arab-dominated government has long denied backing the janjaweed, a militia of Arab nomads blamed for much of the atrocities against ethnic African villagers in Darfur in 2003, when African rebels first took up arms against Khartoum.

More than 200,000 people have since been killed and 2.5 million displaced since 2003.

posted November 09, 2006 07:34 AM            

In a Calm Corner of Darfur, Villagers Rebuild Ties
The New York Times
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
November 8, 2006

ARTALA, Sudan — Omar Abdul Aziz Gader cupped his hand over his eyes and scanned a landscape of scorched fields and mud huts reduced to rings of ash.

Where others might have seen a wasteland, Mr. Gader saw home.

“It’s good to be back,” he said.

As a displaced person from Darfur, Mr. Gader found his options were not great. He could have stayed in the packed, increasingly unruly camp where he had been living for the past two years, or he could have ventured back to Artala, his native village, which was burned to the ground by nomadic raiders.

He decided to go home in September after learning that his corner of southwestern Darfur was actually rather peaceful, a place where nomads and farmers had begun to take halting steps toward reconciliation.

Much of Darfur, a vast swath of territory in western Sudan, is still a battlefield, with vicious fighting between the Sudanese government and rebel forces, and masses of people fleeing their villages each day.

But there are other parts, lesser known, where people are heading the other way, going home.

It is a journey that is also difficult, with homecomings that may prove to be short-lived. But aid workers estimate that there are several thousand returnees like Mr. Gader — and many more on their way.

Mr. Gader says he is looking ahead, building a new hut and planting onions, though at times the past seizes him.

“When I look at my old house,” he said, “I don’t feel fear. I feel shame.”

A vast majority of those who are returning are farmers, the primary victims of the bloodshed in Darfur. In this part of the world, lifestyle and ethnicity are closely connected, with most farmers belonging to non-Arab tribes, while most nomads consider themselves full-blooded Arabs.

The conflict has pitted these two groups against each other, though it wasn’t always like that.

Not so long ago, in the village of Wastani, near Artala, nomadic women and women from farms would meet in the fields halfway between their homes and share little glasses of tea.

The nomads, who herded camels and cows, would bring meat, and the farmers would bring grain, and they would trade with one another in a fragile tapestry of interdependence between two peoples surviving off the same slice of dry, unforgiving land.

“Sometimes I would sit for two days with them and steal jokes,” said Hawa Abdullah, a villager.

But then war came. Nomadic gunmen on horses — some of whom the farmers recognized, some they did not — raided Wastani in 2003, burning huts and shooting people in the chest. It was a nightmare that recurred countless times across Darfur, an area the size of France.

But now, for the first time since then, Wastani’s farmers are moving back, and the nomads are trying to make amends.

Ms. Abdullah said that shortly after she returned, an old Arab friend came to her house with a bundle of food in her arms and tears in her eyes.

“She said she was sorry, and was crying even more than I was,” Ms. Abdullah said.

It is easy to oversimplify Darfur. The broad outlines of the conflict are that non-Arab tribes felt excluded from Sudan’s Arab-led central government, and formed rebel groups to attack government forces. The government responded by arming Arab militias, who did not confront the rebels directly, but instead brutalized civilians who belonged to the same tribal groups as the rebels.

The conflict had been simmering for years, but major fighting erupted in 2003. Since then more than 200,000 people have been killed, and 2.5 million have fled their homes to seek shelter in camps. Despite a peace treaty signed this spring with one of the rebel groups, the killing continues, especially in northern Darfur, and many diplomats and aid experts have forecast a humanitarian disaster.

The American government and European allies have tried to press Sudan to allow United Nations peacekeepers to replace the relatively small force of African Union peacekeepers here, but the Sudanese government has refused, saying the situation in Darfur was not as dire as it has often been portrayed.

Some aspects of life appear to be getting better. A United Nations study released in October found that malnutrition and child mortality had decreased since 2004, and that people who were farming were better off than those squeezed into camps without any land.

Camp dwellers are watching all this cautiously. They have schools, water towers and medical clinics — the very things missing from Darfur’s villages, and which planted the seeds of resentment in the first place. But many camps have morphed into giant villages, with thousands of huts packed together in long rows like streets.

Suleiman Ibrahim, an elder in Mukjar, a camp near Artala with 10,000 displaced people, said that he had heard about people returning home, some just 30 miles away, but that he still worried about armed bandits. “It’s not safe out there,” he said.

But many camps are not so safe either, with unchecked violence and rising tension between supporters of different rebel factions.

Mr. Gader, 32, spoke in hushed tones of camp politics and how some of the displaced people had called him a traitor for even thinking of going home, because they said it bolstered the government’s claim that things were not so bad. Mr. Gader, who lived in a huge camp in southern Darfur called Kalma, with an estimated population of 100,000, said he, his wife and his two children had to leave in the middle of the night.

“We basically escaped,” he said.

Aid workers and camp dwellers say camp elders have a vested financial interest in keeping as many people as possible in the camp, because the elders can make money by siphoning food aid and selling it in local markets. But the returnees are learning that home is a complicated place, too.

Artala, like Wastani, is a mixed community of farmers and nomads, and there is an unspoken rule not to talk about the conflict.

“What’s the point?” said one of the elders, a man named Adam Adam.

Wastani used to have a vibrant market every Sunday, when thousands of farmers flocked in from the fields, and nomads rode in from miles around to trade crops, livestock, tea, sugar, gossip and sometimes even the hands of their daughters.

During the years of conflict, the market emptied. James Wole, a team leader for CARE International, the large aid organization that was one of the first to go into Darfur, said the nomads eventually realized that they were hurting their own businesses, which is one reason they were eager for their old farming friends to come home.

“The truth is these people are very interdependent, in many practical ways,” Mr. Wole said. Mohammed Ibrahim Dibba, the commander of an African Union peacekeeping base in Mukjar, said: “I hear these reports on the radio about genocide, but I don’t see that coming, at least not here. The people are coming together — gradually.”

Security remains a touchy issue. Farmers here said nobody had been killed in months, but many grumbled that the same bandits who raided their villages are now the policemen in town. Several farmers identified Adam Medani Hamad, a nomad who roams the area around Wastani with his two wives and dozens of cattle, as a janjaweed, a bandit. He denied that, and said he was a member of the local defense force. He even has a laminated yellow card to prove it.

“We didn’t just welcome the farmers home, we brought them home,” Mr. Hamad said, referring to the escorts that nomads provided for some of the returning farmers. In a nearby village, aid workers said a policeman had been killed trying to protect farmers from bandits.

CARE is trying to build on this momentum by helping farmers and nomads form joint committees to oversee agricultural and water issues.

But many farmers are still suspicious. Mr. Gader said his new hut would be made from straw, not mud. “You never know when we might be leaving again,” he said.

And Ms. Abdullah said the food her Arab friend brought her in a fit of tears was very good. But it has been more than six months. And she has not seen the woman again.

posted November 18, 2006 12:20 PM              

18 November 2006

quote:

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A TOP adviser to Sudan’s president said yesterday there was no problem with including UN troops with African soldiers in a mixed Darfur peacekeeping force, but that the levels of each side still had to be worked out in a key deal aimed at ending violence in the war-torn region.

---

posted November 22, 2006 11:16 PM              

UN News Service (New York)

November 21, 2006
Posted to the web November 22, 2006

quote:

---

Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today that the Sudanese Government's agreement in principle last week to a hybrid United Nations-African Union (AU) peacekeeping force inside Darfur could become "a turning point" in stemming the spiralling misery in the war-torn region and resolving the deadly conflict.

---

continued on...
http://allafrica.com/stories/200611220003.html

Eritrea: Deploying Peacekeeping Mission Without the Will of the Sudanese People is Illegal

Shabait.com (Asmara)

EDITORIAL
November 22, 2006
Posted to the web November 22, 2006

quote:

---

Regarding the deployment of UN peace keeping mission, the UN Secretary General, Mr. Kofi Annan recently said: "The Government of Sudan has agreed to accept a joint UN and AU peacekeeping mission". After being a surprise to many, this has been discarded as a lie by the people in charge or in a diplomatic language reduced to a loll as "Mr. Kofi Annan has read what is not written, by mistake", and this has been notified to all mass media outlets.

---

contined on...
http://allafrica.com/stories/200611220963.html

posted November 22, 2006 11:33 PM              

Thursday 23 November 2006 05:00

posted December 05, 2006 09:28 AM            

(AXcess News) New York - The situation in war-torn Darfur, a region of Sudan, remains volatile the United Nations said Monday, although there were fewer incidents than usual reported over the past week.

In its latest news update, the UN said Government forces and an allied militia were reported to have burned down a North Darfur village during attacks on Friday and Saturday.

The United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) added that there are reports of civilian casualties in the attack and there are also indications that all of the villagers' livestock was looted.

More than 200,000 people are estimated to have been killed in Darfur since 2003 because of fighting between Government forces, allied militias and rebel groups. Another 2 million people have become internally displaced or been forced to flee into neighboring Chad.

Annan's Principal Deputy Special Representative for Sudan, Taye-Brook Zerihoun, held talks over the weekend in Khartoum with Salim Ahmed Salim, the Special Envoy of the Chairperson of the African Union Commission. He also met Sudanese Foreign Minister Lam Akol to discuss cooperation between UNMIS and the Government.

The meetings follow Zerihoun's return from Abuja, Nigeria, where the AU Peace and Security Council discussed Darfur at a summit late last week.

In a communique after the Abuja summit, the Peace and Security Council extended the mandate of the current AU peace mission in Darfur, known as AMIS, by six months until the end of June next year.

Participants also endorsed the conclusions reached at a meeting last month in Addis Ababa for a three-phased process of enhanced UN support to AMIS culminating in a hybrid UN-AU peacekeeping operation.

posted December 26, 2006 09:40 PM            

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has told the United Nations he endorses a plan for a joint African Union-U.N. peacekeeping force to help quell violence and protect civilians in Darfur.

But in a December 23 letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan made public on Tuesday, Bashir also said the plan should be carried out through a special panel on which Khartoum has a seat, a move diplomats said would effectively give Sudan veto power over all aspects of its implementation.

Diplomats who have seen the letter, distributed to members of the 15-nation U.N. Security Council on Tuesday, said that while Bashir's message contained positive elements, it was not clear whether it represented a real step forward in putting the plan into effect.

To help sort out the situation, the council is expected to invite Annan to brief it on the letter later this week, U.N. officials said.

The question of whether Bashir was now standing aside and eliminating obstacles to the plan, or clinging to ambiguities in an effort to further stall its implementation, was crucial as Annan is preparing to leave office this Sunday to make way for new Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of South Korea.

Bashir was replying to a letter from Annan delivered last week in which the secretary-general tried to pin down the Sudanese leader by asking him to give his formal consent for what Annan has been describing as a hybrid AU-U.N. force of at least 22,600 troops and police.

Bashir has flatly opposed a purely U.N. force, calling it a move to recolonize his vast East African nation. He has made a series of contradictory statements on a hybrid force.

At least 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million driven from their homes and into squalid camps during three years of fighting in Darfur between rebel groups, government troops and government-backed militias.

'VIABLE FRAMEWORK' FOR PEACE DEAL?

Under the hybrid plan, which has already been endorsed by the African Union, the force would be under AU command.

But the commander would report to a special envoy who would be jointly appointed by the African Union and the United Nations and who would be in charge of the overall political direction of the international mission in Darfur.

In his letter, Bashir said he agreed that the AU-U.N. plan, which leaves the size and composition of the force up to the AU and the United Nations, would "constitute a viable framework for peaceful settlement to the conflict in Darfur."

He also said an existing agreement between the United Nations and Khartoum on the legal status of an existing U.N. mission in southern Sudan "would be applicable" to the situation in Darfur as well.

U.N. diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, welcomed that statement, which they said appeared to provide a legal basis for U.N. troops in Darfur.

But they expressed concern about Bashir's statement that deployment of the hybrid force would be carried out through the Tripartite Committee, a body on which Sudan served alongside the United Nations and the AU.

U.N. officials have in the past warned that empowering the Tripartite Committee in this way appeared to give the Khartoum government veto power over AU-U.N. moves.

Annan, in initial comments on the letter on Friday, before its public release, said the reports he had received about it "encourage me to think we may tomorrow (Saturday) receive a green light from President Bashir."

He said he expected Bashir to agree "to a full cease-fire, a renewed effort to bring all parties into the political process, and deployment of the proposed hybrid African Union-United Nations force to protect the population."

This article: http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=1915262006

Now what exactly is the Tripartite Committee and who is a part of it besides Sudan??