General News

Leaders of Sudanese rebel groups arrive in Qatar to discuss peace mediation

Date: May 30, 2016

The leaders of Darfur’s rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), and the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM-MM), arrived in the Qatari capital, Doha, on Monday to discuss Qatar’s mediation in Sudan’s ongoing conflict.

JEM and SLM-MM are hoping that Monday’s discussion with the Qatari government will address the root causes of the Sudanese crisis, particularly in regard to Darfur, as well as unite international mediation efforts.

In January, the Qatari Deputy Prime Minister, Ahmed bin Abdullah Al-Mahmoud, met in Paris with the leader of JEM, Gibril Ibrahim, and SLM-MM leader, Minni Minnawi, for further discussion on the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur (DDPD).

Several years earlier, Doha-brokered Darfur peace negotiations resulted in the signing of the DDPD by the Sudanese government and Sudan’s Liberation and Justice Movement (LJM) in July 2011.

The agreement, however, was rejected by JEM and SLM-MM, who instead called for the opening up of DDPD for further negotiations.

Earlier this month, Ibrahim told the Sudan Tribune that they intended to ask Qatar to join the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP), led by former South African President Thabo Mbeki, in order to have a united framework for negotiating a number of issues on Darfur – and a comprehensive peace in Sudan.

However, the Sudanese presidency rejected the armed movements’ proposal, describing it as “an attempt to circumvent the AUHIP-proposed roadmap”.

Hitherto, both JEM and SLM-MM had engaged in several rounds of peace talks with the Sudanese government under the auspices of the AUHIP.

However, these talks in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, stalled and no further progress on the pending issues was made.

In 2003, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and JEM rebel groups took up arms against Khartoum.

Like rebel groups in South Sudan, prior to independence, they accused the Sudanese government of politically and economically marginalising the non-Arab population of the region.

In response, Khartoum armed the nomadic Arab Rizeigat and Misseriya “Janjaweed” militias to fight the non-Arab Fur and Zaghawa populations of Darfur.

In a press statement to the Tribune, the rebel groups accused Khartoum of being reluctant to achieve peace.

“The regime speaks about peace while its warplanes kill children in Heiban and burns villages in south Kordofan and its militias carry out massacres in Darfur’s peaceful villages such as the recent incident in Azirni in West Darfur,” said the statement referring to the killing of a number of men in the Azirni mosque.

They added that they would seek a resolution by whatever means possible, including negotiations “to end the totalitarian regime, stop the war and build a state that is based on equal citizenship”.

In 2009, the International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted Omar al-Bashir on counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, with three counts of genocide later added.

In 2014 Darfur experienced the highest levels of violence and displacement since the perceived height of the genocide in 2004.

Nearly a half a million or more people were displaced in 2014, reported the Insight On Conflict (IOC) think tank.

“There is an ideological vacuum at the heart of Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party (NCP), its leaders no longer interested in a radical or reforming Islamist project yet offering no alternative political vision,” said the International Crisis Group (ICG)

President Omar Al-Bashir’s 2015 re-election signalled a strengthening of the political centre around its long-time leader, neutralising opposition and forcing an empty “national dialogue” process with little prospect of significant outcomes, reported ICG.

“The March 2016 death of Hassan al-Turabi, the Islamist ‘salvation’ regime’s original architect, highlighted the absence of younger, credible figures to revive a project in terminal decline since he left government in the late 1990s,” said ICG.

--ANA--

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