An alliance of rebel leaders from Darfur said on Thursday that they needed more time to heal internal splits, and that unless something changes quickly, the anticipated peace talks scheduled for later this month would probably fail.
Khamis Abdullah Abakar, chairman of the United Front for Liberation and Development, an umbrella group of several Darfur rebel factions, said "we are trying to consult with each other but there are still serious divisions."
"Right now we're headed toward another Abuja," he said, referring to Abuja, Nigeria, where a peace deal signed by the Sudanese government and one rebel faction last year hardly stopped Darfur's bloodshed and may have only added to the chaos.
On Thursday, Khamis and a group of fellow rebels from Darfur, the troubled region of western Sudan, lounged in a mustard-colored villa in Asmara, Eritrea's capital, making phone calls and watching European soap operas on TV.
All of this was courtesy of the Eritrean government, which has been a loyal friend to many of Darfur's rebel groups and a player in the peace negotiations, even as US officials are accusing Eritrea of sponsoring terrorism in other parts of the region.
BIG AMBITIONS
Eritrea is a little country with big ambitions.
Since its independence from Ethiopia in 1993, it has projected an aggressive foreign policy, shaping events in the Horn of Africa, though it has only 5 million people and is one of the poorest countries in the world.
In the past few months, Eritrea has opened its doors to rebel commanders from its neighbors, especially Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia, which is part of the reason US officials are alarmed.
The State Department says Eritrea has been shipping arms to Islamist fighters in Somalia, an allegation that the Eritrean government denies.
At the same time, US diplomats have been quietly working with the Eritreans to push Darfur's ever-expanding galaxy of rebel groups to participating in peace talks scheduled for the end of this month in Libya.
The Eritreans have a decent track record, US officials say, when it comes to Sudan. Last year, Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki brokered a peace deal between the Sudanese government and rebels in a separate conflict in eastern Sudan that had ground on for 15 years and that cost thousands of lives.
INFLUENCE IN DARFUR
African Union (AU) officials said Eritrea wields even more influence in Darfur, because of its contacts with the rebel groups there.
The Eritreans "have control over some of these movements," said Sam Ibok, a senior adviser of the AU. "And the Eritreans have played a constructive role."
Leaders of Darfur rebel groups are spread out among a number of countries, including Chad, Libya, Egypt, as well as within Darfur itself.
More than half a dozen Darfur rebel groups have hung a shingle in Asmara.
And in some cases, like the United Front for Liberation and Development, which claims to have more than 10,000 fighters in Darfur, the Eritrean government pays the rent.
The rebels say Eritrea is a good base of operations because it is safe; its has an international airport and reliable phone lines; and various rebel leaders can meet anytime, day or night, in one of the city's countless sidewalk cafes and talk shop over a cup of espresso -- something they definitely could not do in Darfur itself.
"This has been an important front for Darfur for years," Khamis said, strolling down a sunny street in Asmara. "We like it here."
ATTACK ON AU TROOPS
The situation on the ground in Darfur seems to be degenerating by the day, as evidenced by the massacre of 10 AU peacekeepers last weekend.
The rebel leaders in Asmara denied that their fighters were responsible, even though AU officials have blamed the attack on groups allied to some of them. Several rebel leaders said they feared the bloodshed would only get worse if the talks in Libya failed.
"We could get the people's hopes up and there could be a lot of frustration when nothing is accomplished," said Abdulaziz Dafallah, a leader of the Revolution Democratic Forces Front, a Darfur rebel group that is part of Khamis' alliance.
He said the rebels were behind in two key areas that were supposed to be wrapped up by now: appointing a negotiating team to represent all major groups and training the negotiators.
Ibok agreed this was a problem and said "the people we require urgently for these talks don't seem to be ready for them."
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS