Mediators strive to break deadlock at Darfur talks

ABUJA (AFP) — African Union mediators continued informal negotiations on Saturday to break the deadlock over Chad’s participation in the ongoing peace talks to end the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region, an AU spokesman said, while playing down the problem.
“Negotiations are continuing at the highest levels to reach a compromise on the Chad issue. It is a broad-based negotiation by the mediation team, foreign partners and the aggrieved parties,” Nouredine Mezni told AFP.

He said the AU was also expecting a final submission of the contribution of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), one of the two rebel groups fighting the Khartoum government, to a revised Declaration of Principle (DoP) before convening a formal meeting of the warring parties to disucss the key document.

The presence of Chad has stalled the AU-mediated talks which opened here on June 10 because of the strong opposition of the SLM and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) to Ndjamena’s role as co-mediator, on the grounds that it is biased against them.

“Nothing has changed except that informal negotiations to get the talks back on track are still going on. Formal talks are yet to resume because of the row over Chad,” Mezni told AFP. He said there was nothing unusual about the hitches.

“If you recall, the issue came up at the last round of the talks in December and it was resolved. We are also going to thrash this one out. So there is no cause for alarm,” Mezni said.

Chad has an eastern border with Darfur and hosts some 200,000 of the 2.4 million people estimated to have been displaced by the conflict, saying it is biased against them.

Fighting in Darfur broke out in February 2003 when an uprising representing the mainly black population of the region led Khartoum to unleash Arab militias known as Janjaweed, who have been accused of “ethnic cleansing,” torture, rape and intimidation.

International pressure has increased to end the war that has claimed between 180,000 and 300,000 lives and displaced some 2.4 million people, especially since the resolution last year of a separate conflict which had engulfed oil-rich south Sudan for more than two decades.

The AU’s special envoy on the Darfur peace talks, Tanzanian-born Salim Ahmed Salim, foreign partners, facilitators and observers were working hard to break the deadlock, Mezni said.

“We will soon get over it,” he added.

African mediators and foreign partners had produced a draft DoP to be adopted by the warring parties late Thursday but no progress could be made because of the row over Chad.

Mezni told AFP more SLM delegates arrived Friday for the talks.

“We hope the SLM will now make its final presentation on the DoP since its delegation has been boosted with the arrival of more negotiators,” he said.

The AU-mediated talks resumed after a six-month break over mutual accusations of ceasefire violations. The parties have yet to get together outside initial plenary sessions.