Eight days before a UN Security Council deadline for Sudan to rein in state-sponsored Arab militias in Darfur, Interior Minister Abdul Rahim Mohammed Hussein said in comments published Saturday that they would be disarmed only gradually.
"The collection of weapons will be gradual and begin with an initiative for reconciliation among the tribes through the native administrations," the minister told Khartoum newspapers after a visit to the South Darfur state capital of Nyala.
PHOTO: AP
The minister, who is Khartoum's pointman on Darfur, gave no timeframe for the "reconciliation" initiative, but the government has only just begun to re-establish the native administrations, which were disbanded in the 1970s.
Hussein said the new bodies would have wide-ranging powers in "administrative, security and judicial matters."
On July 30, the UN Security Council gave Khartoum 30 days to disarm the militias, held responsible for a reign of terror against non-Arab ethnic minorities in Darfur.
But since then, Sudanese government officials have only once given any timeframe for the disarmament process.
On August 5, North Darfur police chief General Jamal El-Houerees said the process would begin in the week beginning August 12, but there has been no further announcement since.
UN officials say Khartoum has also made little progress in honoring its commitments under an agreement with Annan made public on July 3, notably securing safe zones for the more than one million people displaced by the government's bloody policies.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees warned Friday that a further 30,000 displaced people were poised to flee over the border into neighboring Chad, joining 200,000 refugees already there, because of the continuing depredations by the militias.
"We are concerned that such an influx of 30,000 refugees in one single spot along the Chad-Sudan border, if it were to materialize, would put a strain on our ability to care for and feed refugees in our camps there," the UN agency said.
The UNHCR's director of Sudan operations, Jean-Marie Fakhouri, met with representatives in the camp at Masteri.
"This group of displaced people said they want protection from UN peacekeepers," the agency's statement said. "If they do not get international security guarantees, they said they will all cross to Chad as soon as the rain-swollen river that marks the border with Sudan dries up."
Most of the displaced people in the Masteri camp fled attacks on their own villages earlier this year, but are still prey to state-sponsored Arab militias, the UNHCR said.
"When they venture outside, they are regularly attacked by Janjaweed militiamen. "A 43-year-old woman told members of Fakhouri's team that she was one of many women who had been raped when she went out of Masteri for food and firewood.
"She said women are being raped every day, but they continue to go out because the men will be killed if they venture out."
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