SUDAN: A deal may be close to end the decades-old war in Darfur, western Sudan, which has killed thousands and forced a million from their homes, reports Declan Walsh in Nairobi
Pressure is mounting on the Sudan government to halt violence in Darfur, where its troops are accused of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and orchestrating a reign of terror in concert with a rampaging Arab militia.
The allegations of gross human rights abuses in western Sudan coincide with a blossoming peace to the south, where government and rebel officials predict a deal to end the 21-year war "within days".
But the international goodwill Khartoum has won for negotiating an end to the southern war, which claimed more than two million lives, has been soured by a stream of atrocity reports from Darfur.
Last Friday the senior UN human rights official, Mr Bertrand Ramcharan, told the Security Council the Sudan government was "organising and actively supporting" the Janjaweed, a horse- and camel-mounted militia responsible for a campaign of murder and rape that has forced one million people from their homes.
Another 110,000 have fled across the border into neighbouring Chad, where aid workers fear a massive humanitarian crisis.
The Sudanese military has been providing weapons and air support to the Janjaweed in pursuit of a brutal "scorched earth" policy, said Mr Ramcharan, the acting High Commissioner for Human Rights. "There are repeated war crimes and crimes against humanity, and this is taking place before our very eyes," he added.
The Darfur war started in February 2003, led by rebels who complained of economic marginalisation and Khartoum's failure to protect farmers from attacks by armed Arab nomads.
Since then Khartoum has tried to quell the insurgency by bombing villages in rebel-supporting areas and backing the Janjaweed, a vicious Arab militia whose sweep of ethnically African villages has been widely characterised as "ethnic cleansing".
The violence has caused a massive exodus of villagers towards the main towns and into Chad, where 110,000 are sheltering in desolate desert camps.
Aid workers accuse Khartoum of preventing humanitarian access to the worst-affected areas and of starving its own people. A strongly worded UN report last week described the situation in Kailek, a remote town devastated by Janjaweed attacks.
After torching the houses the horse-mounted militiamen encircled the town, cutting its inhabitants off from international aid. Townspeople were living among piles of their own excrement in "outrageous" conditions that indicated a policy of forced starvation, the report concluded.
It added that some veteran aid workers left the town "visibly shaken" by what they had seen.
Analysts and human rights groups draw comparisons with the government-led slaughter of 800,000 people in Rwanda a decade ago this month. "Sudan is Rwanda in slow motion," Mr John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group told a US congressional committee last week.
Relief agencies fear an immense humanitarian crisis. Once seasonal rains start to fall over Darfur and eastern Chad at the end of this month many roads will become impassable, severely hampering the delivery of emergency food, shelter and other assistance.
President Omar al-Bashir's government, which came to power in a 1989 military coup, denies supporting the Janjaweed, but a strongly worded report last week by Human Rights Watch disagreed. It offered further proof that government forces were working "hand in glove" with the Janjaweed to commit atrocities including widespread rape and mass execution of boys and men of fighting age.
Striking photos showed torched villages, mass graves and the remains of dead villagers lying untouched in the desert. The report listed 770 civilians murdered in one area alone over the past five months.
Eyewitnesses described a policy of apparent ethnic cleansing. One militia leader reportedly told his victims: "This place is for Arabs, not Africans . . . The Janjaweed is the government."
The Darfur conflict is rooted in a decades-old tension between the region's African farming tribes and the Arab pastoralists. But the Arab-dominated government's armed support for the Janjaweed in this conflict has dramatically changed both the character and scale of the violence.
According to HRW, the attacks have mainly targeted the Fur, Massalit and Zaghawa tribes, which are accused of supporting the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebel movements.
The storm of allegations came as Khartoum edged closer to peace in neighbouring Kenya. At a lakeside lodge near Naivasha on Friday, Vice-President Osman Ali Taha and Mr John Garang, leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), reported "significant progress" in talks to end a 21-year war that has claimed two million lives.
Painstaking negotiations between the SPLA and Khartoum have appeared close to success several times since last autumn, but yesterday both sides issued a joint statement pledging to "reach an agreement in the coming few days".
Analysts agree a deal is close. "There is renewed optimism for a framework deal next week," said Mr David Mozersky of ICG in Nairobi.
Khartoum has enthusiastically embraced the peace process, partly to shake off its "terrorist-supporting nation" label imposed by the US in the late 1990s.
However, the Darfur atrocities have soured international goodwill again, and the US has made peace in the turbulent region a condition of resuming normal relations.
The US delegation walked out of a meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission last week after a bloc of African countries supported Sudan's nomination to the body.