Sudan

Darfur rebel group pulls out of peace talks

Article published on the 2009-03-21 Latest update 2009-03-21 17:22 TU

Jem fighters
(Photo: AFP)

The leader of a key Darfur-based rebel group announced Friday the end of peace talks with the Sudanese government after Khartoum’s expulsion of foreign aid agencies from the war-torn region.

Head of the Justice and Equality Movement (Jem) Khalil Ibrahim said that his group will no longer attend the peace talks hosted in Doha, Qatar, because President Omar el-Beshir’s decision to expel the NGOs condemns his people to death.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for el-Beshir on 4 March, and the Sudanese President retaliated by kicking out 13 high-profile international aid agencies, including Oxfam and Médecins sans Frontières.

The Jem signed an accord with Khartoum on a package of confidence-building measures at the Qatari mediated peace talks last month, and now says that the expulsion of the NGOs broke those agreements.

“Unfortunately, the government violated the good intention agreement… [when it] expelled 13 NGOs from Darfur. This is a real violation of one of the provisions [of the agreement],” Sulaiman Sandal, Jem’s chief of staff told RFI.

“We are calling on the international community so as to take responsibility that there is genocide going on, by depriving our people of food – there are war crimes being committed”, Sandal said from Darfur.

The United Nations says that expelling the aid agencies will leave 1.1 million people without food, 1.5 million without health care, and more than one million without drinking water in Darfur’s many refugee and displaced persons’ camps.

Many of the 300,000 people who the UN says have died in the Darfur conflict starved or died from disease. Sudan claims that the numbers are inflated, citing only 10,000 deaths.

In an interview published Saturday, ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo accused Beshir of “exterminating” people in Darfur.

Ocampo says he has filed an application to appeal against the absence of genocide charges on the warrant, after he had originally requested three counts of genocide-related crimes.

“As soon as Omar Beshir travels outside of Sudan, he could be arrested and I will work for that,” Ocampo said. “Slobodan Milosevic was arrested. Charles Taylor was arrested. This will happen. When will depend on national states first and also the international community.”