UN Council hears pleas and threats in Darfur

EL FASHER, Sudan, June 10 (Reuters) The UN Security Council heard strong opposition to a robust United Nations force in Darfur and was told a recent peace pact had stoked violence within squalid camps for homeless war victims.

One tribal leader even threatened a jihad, or holy war, if non-African troops came to Sudan's vast western region and the governor of North Darfur made clear his resistance to UN peacekeepers.

''The peace agreement divided the camps into two.

Antagonising those who haven't signed the peace agreement has not helped,'' Jan Pronk, the top U.N. envoy in Sudan yesterday warned the 15 council members visiting Sudan for the first time.

The council, which authorises peacekeeping missions, called off its planned trip to the Abu Shouk camp near this North Darfur town because of security risks.

Instead the 15 members met more than a dozen representatives from the camps behind closed doors as well as relief workers, government and tribal leaders who told them heartbreaking stories but also criticised the visitors.

''It brought home to people why one had to do this,'' Britain's UN Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, head of the UN delegation, said of U.N involvement in Darfur, noting the cries for humanitarian help in a region where only some 30 per cent of the children attended school.

On May 5, the government and the largest rebel group in Darfur signed a peace agreement, negotiated by the African Union, but two other factions refused to sign.

While the door is left open for other factions to sign, the rebels have been fighting each other instead of the government, creating more mayhem in Darfur, where at least 200,000 people have died and more than 2 million are homeless.

''We have seen in many camps in Darfur near El Fasher, very strong demonstrations against the Darfur peace agreement,'' Kate Steains, the acting head of the UN mission in Darfur, told the Council ambassadors. ''It changes the dynamic in the camps.'' ''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 UN military planning mission into Darfur for a possible transfer to a UN 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 UN peacekeepers was echoed by Mowad Jalaladin, a member of the Barty tribe he said has 250,000 members. He said a UN 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 organisations who financed this armed rebellion.'' REUTERS KD RK0930