UN Council hears pleas and threats in Darfur
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-06-10 17:04 "There appears to be a momentum building against the Darfur peace agreement"
with "new attacks and new displacement," because of mounting frustration at not
being able to leave the camps.
JANJAWEED MILITIA
Rebel groups took up arms in early 2003, accusing the central government of
neglect. The conflict took on political and racial overtones with the
Arab-dominated Khartoum government accused of arming militia, known as
Janjaweed, accused of rape, killings and burning down villages.
Council members also were immediately confronted with what they did not want
to hear in a welcoming session with the Wali or governor of North Darfur, Osman
Kibir. He told the group Darfur needed humanitarian aid but "not troops."
In response, Jones Parry noted that the Janjaweed should be disarmed by the
government, as it promised. "That action is way overdue," he said.
Sudan President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir told the council in Khartoum on Tuesday
he would allow a U.N. military planning mission into Darfur for a possible
transfer to a U.N. force from the African Union, now in Darfur. But Al-Bashir
refused to give a green light to any robust force needed to stop the violence.
The government's resistance to U.N. peacekeepers was echoed by Mowad
Jalaladin, a member of the Barty tribe he said has 250,000 members. He said a
U.N. force in Darfur was tantamount to "foreign occupation and intervention."
"We are declaring a jihad against them," he told a group of reporters.
He said the Security Council should not become "an instrument of the ugly
undertakings of the United States of America" and that the "root causes of the
Darfur conflict are the doing of the Jewish organizations who financed this
armed rebellion."
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