Darfur rebels want assurances before talks

The Justice and Equality Movement seeks reassurances from mediators about a new round of talks with the Sudanese government.

Darfur's most active rebel group is seeking reassurances from Qatari mediators about a new round of talks with the Sudanese government planned for October, its spokesman said. The Justice and Equality Movement agreed in May to resume the talks it broke off two months earlier when the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of the Sudanese president Omar al-Beshir for alleged war crimes in Darfur.

But after a meeting with the US Sudan envoy Scott Gration, the JEM said it was willing to discuss only an exchange of prisoners and the return of 13 aid organisations which Beshir expelled from Darfur in the wake of the ICC's decision. It said it would not discuss a ceasefire. "We want to know what will happen with regards to the issue of our prisoners and the return of aid organisations to Darfur," the JEM spokesman Ahmed Hussein Adam told reporters in Doha yesterday, ahead of talks with the Qatari mediators.

"We will not resume negotiations the way it was before," Mr Adam said. "We want serious and real negotiations that have a clear methodology and not a chaotic process." He denied that the JEM was setting conditions for resuming the talks, noting that the rebels had already unilaterally freed 84 government troops it had been holding as a goodwill gesture. Before negotiations broke off earlier this year, the JEM signed a February deal on confidence-building measures that was hailed by the international community. That deal marked the rebel group's first contacts with the government since 2007.

The most heavily armed of the Darfur rebel groups, the JEM declined to sign an abortive 2006 peace deal that was inked by just one faction. In May last year, it launched an unprecedented assault on the Sudanese capital, reaching Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman just across the Nile from the presidential palace. At least 222 people were killed. Special tribunals set up in the wake of that offensive have since sentenced more than 100 captured JEM fighters to death.

The United Nations says up to 300,000 people have died and 2.7 million fled their homes since ethnic minority rebels in Darfur first rose up against the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum in February 2003. The government says 10,000 people have been killed. *AFP