As many as two new guerrilla factions have emerged in Western Sudan, potentially complicating peace talks that were scheduled to start yesterday between the Sudanese government and its two established rebel foes, the UN's top envoy to Sudan said in an interview on Sunday.
Little is known about the power and political objectives of the new insurgents. But with their recent attacks, they have posed a new source of insecurity in an already traumatized region and have imperiled the safety of African Union monitors and aid workers. The new guerrillas are not among the signers of the cease-fire agreements between the government of Sudan and the two established Darfur rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Army.
PHOTO: AFP
"At the beginning I thought they were an artificial creation, but now I think it's more serious," said Jan Pronk, the UN special representative on Sudan. "It's a force with which you have to reckon."
Pronk, who is from the Netherlands, said that one group was based near the northwestern border with Chad and that the other was in Southern Darfur.
According to Major General Festus Okonkwo, a Nigerian who commands the African Union Cease-Fire Commission, the new northern group, the National Movement for Reform and Development, attacked a government convoy on Oct. 6. Okonkwo said it was unclear whether the same faction was responsible for planting mines that killed two aid workers recently.
Okonkwo described the group as a breakaway faction of the Justice and Equality Movement. That faction's chief negotiator, Ahmed Tugod Lissan, said the new group was created by an ousted field commander of the Justice and Equality Movement who now is collaborating with the Khartoum government and its allies in Chad.
"They have been created by the government," Lissan said.
The government said it knew nothing about the group.
News of the latest factions came on the eve of peace talks. They are to be mediated by the African Union and are aimed at ending a nearly 20-month-long conflict that has left more than 1.5 million people homeless and, according to the World Food Program, claimed 70,000 lives from hunger and disease. UN officials have said that the insecurity in the region has threatened the delivery of emergency food aid.
As rebel and government delegates arrived here in recent days -- rebels in suits and coats, the government officials in white robes and turbans -- they took turns accusing each other of bad faith.
The Sudanese agriculture minister and chief negotiator in Abubja, Magzoub el-Khalifa Ahmed, blamed rebels for fomenting trouble across Darfur to sustain international attention.
"They need to stimulate all these governments and all these organizations on their side," he argued, "by making the situation worse on the ground."
Rebels said the government could not be trusted.
"My honest feeling is they're interested in delaying," the Sudan Liberation Army's chief negotiator, Sharif Harir, said.
No one expects these talks, which are scheduled to last up to three weeks, to yield a comprehensive peace deal. The previous session broke off last month after disagreements over whether the government would disarm the allied Arab militias that have killed and brutalized villagers in Darfur.
The Security Council, threatening sanctions, has pressed Sudan to disarm the gunmen and has urged both sides to allow access for aid.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has commissioned independent observers to assess whether the violence in Darfur constitutes genocide.
The Security Council is sche-duled to conduct a special session on Sudan next month in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital. The council has only met outside its headquarters in New York twice; once was in 1952 in Paris, and the other was 20 years later in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
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