Sudan accepts Darfur peace deal but rebels dig in for concessions

The Sudanese government, which for three years has been waging war on its own people in the region of Darfur, said yesterday that it had accepted a peace plan prepared by the African Union.

If it sticks, the accord should mean that the authorities disarm the Janjaweed militias which have been responsible for countless murders of civilians in villages and refugee camps. The militias, drawn from Arab tribes, often attacked on camelback or horseback, striking panic into the villagers. They were regularly backed up by helicopter gunships as they attacked. Organised and funded by Khartoum's armed forces, they have fought a brutal war of rape and ethnic cleansing, mostly against civilians in a barren area the size of France.

All sides in the conflict have continued fighting, despite a 2004 ceasefire, according to the African Union, which has 7,000 peacekeepers in Darfur.

The rebellion by Darfurians in 2003 was sparked by feelings of neglect and discrimination by the Arab-dominated central government. The rebellion linked two rebel groups called the Sudanese Liberation Army/ Movement (SLA/SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).

However it was the murderous tactics of the Janjaweed against defenceless civilians which shocked international opinion. They killed tens of thousands of people and raped or otherwise assaulted thousands of women and girls as they burnt and destroyed hundreds of rural villages.

Yesterday the rebel movements in Darfur, which are under intense international pressure to also accept the 85-page peace plan drafted by African Union mediators, were digging in for further concessions.

The AU had set yesterday as a deadline for the government and the two Darfur rebel groups to end the negotiations, which have lasted two years while the conflict raged across the vast western region of Sudan.

Khartoum's acts of "genocide" have been condemned by the US government, but Sudan's position as a key supplier of oil to China meant that international pressure was always somewhat muted.

But the SLM and JEM rebels issued statements rejecting the agreement.

"This document is not acceptable to us, and we are not going to go by it or sign it," the JEM spokesman Ahmed Hussain said. "We will submit our joint position on this issue to the AU mediation team this afternoon."

Saifaldin Haroun, a spokesman for the main faction of the SLM, told news agencies: "We will not sign this agreement. We will only sign the agreement that includes all our demands, certainly not this one. This is the position of the two movements."

The rebels objected to various provisions of the peace plan, including security arrangements for disarming the Janjaweed and other militias. Other reservations raised by the rebels were that the document did not consider giving the Darfur region a vice-presidential political post in the government, or adequately resolve other power-sharing and wealth distribution issues which triggered the conflict.

Civilians bore the brunt of the government's brutal counter-insurgency campaign, which forced more than two million from their homes. At least 1.8 million civilians are living in squalid camps in Darfur and some 225,000 have fled over the border to refugee camps in Chad. The United Nations estimates that on top of those displaced by the low-intensity conflict, some 1.5 million other people need some form of emergency food aid because the local economy has been wiped out by conflict.