DARFUR REBEL GROUP RELEASE 60 SOLDIERS, POLICE

A major Darfur rebel group released 60 captured government soldiers and police on Saturday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said, a move that could help clear a logjam in troubled peace talks. The insurgent Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) handed the captives to Red Cross officers who passed them on to government officials on Saturday afternoon, the humanitarian group said.

“JEM has released 55 Sudan Armed Forces soldiers and five policemen,” Red Cross spokesman Saleh Dabbakeh told Reuters. Talks between JEM and Sudan’s government, which started in Doha in February, have stalled over the timing of confidence building measures, including the release of each other’s prisoners and a ceasefire.

JEM has said it wants Khartoum to release captured rebel fighters before any ceasefire is agreed, while Khartoum says it needs an end to hostilities ahead of other moves. The rebel group told Reuters the release took place close to the north Darfur settlement of Kutum, adding it was ready to free more captives if the government reciprocated by releasing imprisoned JEM fighters.

“We are fulfilling the goodwill agreements we signed in Doha,” senior JEM official Ahmed Tugud said. “We still have many government captives and are willing to release them if similar steps are taken by the other side.” No one was immediately available from Sudan’s government to comment on the release.

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SUDANESE MINISTER LOOKS UP TO OBAMA FOR A NEW BEGINNING

U.S. President Barack Obama is turning the page in the West’s troubled relations with Sudan by taking a more constructive approach, a senior Sudanese official said on Thursday. The International Criminal Court has indicted the Sudanese president for war crimes in the Darfur region and European officials say Khartoum is jeopardising a peace deal that ended a separate conflict between Sudan’s north and south.

But Salman al-Wasilla, Sudan’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs, told Reuters in an interview the Obama administration was showing a readiness to break with the past. “We are now witnessing a new era (with) the coming of Obama to office, who is now starting to talk about understanding and respect and support and there was a lack of this before,” he said on the sidelines of an African Union summit in Libya.

Obama this year appointed retired Air Force General Scott Gration, a close adviser, as his special envoy to Sudan and the United States last month hosted a conference of officials from Sudan’s north and south to try to keep their peace deal on track. Attacking Western policies on Sudan over the past few years, al-Wasilla said his oil producing country had complied with international demands over Darfur and ended fighting with the rebels in the south but has not been rewarded.

“When we signed the peace agreement (with the southern rebels) we were promised the lifting of sanctions, we were promised debt relief,” he said. “What has been achieved in four years, it should be rewarded … This is what we need: encouragement and not sanctions and allegations and pressure,” he said.

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SUDAN AND DARFUR REBEL END TALK WITHOUT A DEAL

Talks between Sudan’s government and a Darfur rebel group have been adjourned without agreement, both sides said on Friday, blaming each other for the impasse. The move will be seen as a setback to the United States and mediators from the United Nations and African Union who have been stepping up pressure for a resolution to the festering six-year conflict in Sudan’s remote west.

Khartoum has been holding on-and-off discussions with the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) — Darfur’s most militarily active insurgent organisation — in Qatar since February. The discussions, also brokered by Qatari mediators, are supposed to pave the way to full peace talks, but have stalled on arguments over a series of confidence-building measures including the exchange of prisoners.

The spokesman for the Sudan government side, Al-Shartawi Ja’afar Abd-al-Hakam, told state radio the talks had reached stalemate following JEM’s refusal to let other organisations and rebel groups take part. JEM dismissed the accusation, saying Khartoum was refusing to honour an earlier deal to free JEM prisoners and improve access for humanitarian groups in Darfur.

“There is no point continuing when the government is adamant it will not go through with the goodwill agreement,” senior JEM official Al-Tahir al-Feki told Reuters by phone from his base in Britain. He said the talks would be adjourned for two months for the negotiating teams to consult with their leaders.

JEM has clashed with Sudan’s army a number of times since the beginning of the talks, most recently over control of settlements in North Darfur, on a strategic road leading to the border with neighbouring Chad.

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SUDAN TRIBESMEN ATTACK UN BARGES CARRYING FOOD

Armed tribesmen attacked UN barges carrying food aid in southern Sudan, with unconfirmed reports of casualties, UN officials have said. Gunmen from the Jikany Nuer ethnic group attacked the 27 boats near the town of Nasir, near Sudan’s eastern border with Ethiopia, on Friday. The barges were travelling to the town of Akobo when they were attacked and 16 have returned to Nasir, the UN said.

Locals said several people had been killed, the AFP news agency reported. “We don’t have information on how many people were killed or injured. But everyone we have talked to has described it as an attack,” Michelle Iseminger of the UN’s World Food Programme said. The boats had been travelling on the Sobat tributary, part of the White Nile river system.

The boats had been carrying sorghum and other food aid to refugees who had fled tribal fighting in the south of Sudan. “There are many wounded in the hospital including soldiers, and many killed, there are dozens dead,” said an unnamed Nasir resident quoted by AFP. The boats had included an escort of soldiers from the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

The river, which is the only way to deliver aid to the poorly-developed south of the country, was closed earlier this year because of tensions in the area. A 22-year war between the Islamic north and the Christian and animist South ended in 2005. But correspondents say tension remains and many fear renewed fighting ahead of a referendum on the south’s potential full independence due in 2011.

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BBC: BASHIR REJECTS ICC CHARGES OVER DARFUR CRISIS

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has said the international arrest warrant issued against him for war crimes in Darfur is part of a plot against Sudan and denied responsibility for large-scale killings there. Bashir told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Thursday that the fighting in Sudan’s western Darfur region began as an insurrection and that he had had a responsibility to send troops to fight the rebels there.

Much of the fighting was between local tribes, and allegations of large-scale killing by government forces and government-backed militias were hostile propaganda, he said. United Nations officials say the six-year conflict in Darfur has resulted in up to 300,000 deaths and the displacement of more than 2.7 million people. The International Criminal Court in the Netherlands has issued a warrant against Bashir for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur.

“The ICC ruling is fundamentally null and void,” said Bashir. “For us the ICC’s ruling is a political one,” he added, saying of the ICC charges against him: “This is all lies.” “We do not recognise the court,” he stated. “We refuse to negotiate with them, and we will not hand over anyone.” The ICC has issued arrest warrants for two senior Sudanese officials who Khartoum has refused to send to The Hague to stand trial.

“I challenge anybody to bring me evidence that proves the Sudanese armed forces attacked and killed citizens in Darfur,” Bashir said. Dismissing U.N. estimates of the number of deaths in the Darfur conflict, Bashir said the toll “did not reach 10,000.”

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SUDAN’S AL-BASHIR SURE TO FACE GENOCIDE CHARGES: PROSECUTOR

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court said on Monday he is confident the court’s judges will soon charge Sudan’s president with genocide and three Darfur rebels with war crimes. A three-judge panel at The Hague-based court in March issued a warrant for the arrest of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity for deportations and mass killings in Sudan’s western Darfur region.

While they charged Bashir on seven counts of crimes in Darfur, two of the three judges deemed the evidence insufficient to support genocide. In an interview with Reuters, the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said he had clarified the case to the point that it should meet the judges’ high evidence threshold. “It’s more than enough for the arrest warrant phase,” he said.

Moreno-Ocampo said that the judges had required that he go beyond the normal criteria for an arrest warrant — sufficient grounds for belief of guilt — and remove any doubt that Bashir had tried to exterminate at least one specific group of people, normally the threshold for a guilty verdict.Without giving details, Moreno-Ocampo said he had clearly established that link. Also, one of the two judges who had balked at the genocide indictment has been replaced, he added, increasing the likelihood the panel of judges will take a fresh look at his request.

The Sudanese government has rejected Moreno-Ocampo’s charges and is refusing to cooperate with the court. Khartoum has retaliated by expelling 13 foreign and three domestic humanitarian aid agencies, accusing them of collaborating with the ICC.

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WE ARE NOT READY FOR DARFUR RAINY SEASON: UN

The expulsion of international NGOs means aid agencies are not as ready as they could be for the rainy season in Darfur but a humanitarian crisis is not imminent, a senior U.N. official said on Sunday. Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir expelled 13 international aid agencies after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him in March on charges of masterminding war crimes in Darfur.

Some parts of Darfur, a region roughly the size of France in western Sudan, become very difficult to reach during the rainy season which starts in a few weeks. Rain floods unmade roads and tracks and rivers swell. Many of the camps, where some 2 million people headed after the violence drove them from their homes, lie in flood plains.

Speaking to reporters at the end of a trip to Sudan including Darfur, U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes said: “We are not as ready as we would like to be. Normally before the rainy season, the agencies, NGOs working there would be pre-positioning food and other goods…because it becomes very difficult to move them around once the rainy season started.” Because of the expulsions, those efforts were delayed because it took a while to regain access to warehouses where these goods are kept, Holmes said.

About 4.7 million people rely on humanitarian aid in Darfur, a conflict in which U.N. officials say as many as 300,000 people have died in almost six years of ethnic and political violence. Khartoum says 10,000 have died. “We now have access, we’ll be working extremely hard to make up for lost time. But we’re not in as good a position as we would have been otherwise,” Holmes said.

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SUDAN READY TO RESIST ATTACK ON ITS TERRITORY

Sudan said on Sunday it was ready to repel any attack on its territory, a day after rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement, which Khartoum accuses Chad of supporting, were involved in a clash in Darfur. Chad said it had halted an attempted rebel advance on its capital last week following fierce fighting in the east. N’Djamena has accused Sudan of igniting the clashes by sending armed groups over the border.

Khartoum denies these charges and has in turn, accused Chad of supporting JEM rebels, which attacked the Sudanese capital on May 11, 2008. Sudan has accused Chadian President Idriss Deby of involvement in that attack. “National Defence Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein has affirmed the readiness of the armed forces to repel any aggression on Sudanese lands, pointing to the movements of JEM on the north western border with support from the Chadian government,” the Sudanese News Agency (SUNA) reported.

Hussein made those statements in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, SUNA said. On Saturday JEM rebels clashed in North Darfur with forces loyal to former rebel Minni Arcua Minnawi, the only Darfur rebel to sign a peace deal with the government in 2006. UNAMID spokesman Noureddine Mezni said another brief battle took place on Sunday.

Minnawi leads a faction of the Sudan Liberation Army and became a presidential assistant after the 2006 peace agreement. The fighting in Chad, in which N’Djamena said 225 rebels and 22 government soldiers were killed, threatens a peace deal Chad and Sudan signed in Doha only last week in which they agreed to normalise relations and reject support for rebels hostile to either of them. The two countries resumed fragile diplomatic relations last November after cutting them in May.

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SUDAN HARON WANTED BY ICC, TO HEAD KEY REGION

Sudan has chosen Ahmed Haroun, wanted by the International Criminal Court on Darfur war crimes charges, as governor of a sensitive north-south border province that contains key oil fields, state media said on Friday. State news agency SUNA said President Omar Hassan al-Bashir had named Haroun to lead the province of South Kordofan, which includes the contested border town of Abyei, site of clashes between northern and southern armies last year.

A spokesman for the former southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement had no immediate comment on the move, saying the appointment was Khartoum’s to make. North and south Sudan, whose conflict is separate from the ongoing violence in Darfur in Sudan’s west, have had a troubled relationship since signing a peace deal in 2005 to end two decades of civil war.

The International Crisis Group think tank said in October the peace deal was at risk in South Kordofan, which had “many of the same ingredients” that sparked the conflict in Darfur. Scores of people were killed and more than 50,000 displaced last year when northern and southern armies clashed in Abyei. Both north Sudan and the country’s semi-autonomous south claim the town. At stake is control over nearby oilfields and a pipeline funnelling crude to Sudan’s Red Sea coast.

Sudan says it produces 500,000 barrels of oil a day, a figure which it hopes to raise to 600,000 in 2009.

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SUDAN GIVES WAY FOR MORE AID GROUPS

Sudan’s government says it will invite new aid groups to work in Darfur and allow those still operating there to expand their activities. The UN’s head of humanitarian affairs welcomed the move. Sudan expelled 13 foreign aid groups in March after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

Meanwhile, the backer of a conference on Darfur says it may be cancelled because of opposition from Sudan. The UN says that up to 300,000 people have died during the conflict in Darfur and 2.7 million driven from their homes. Sudan had agreed last month to allow some aid back into Darfur following its expulsion of humanitarian groups.

On Thursday, the minister for humanitarian assistance, Haroun Lual Ruun, said Khartoum would invite new non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to Darfur. He also said it would allow those UN agencies and NGOs remaining in the Sudanese region to “expand their existing operations”.

“I think what we’re hearing… is that new NGOs with new names, new logos, if necessary, can come in ”
John Holmes UN humanitarian chief .

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