Hopes fade for Darfur peace deal

Peace talks aimed at ending the violence in Darfur have been extended until midnight tonight. But observers in the Nigerian capital are pessimistic that a settlement will be reached.

There was hope at the weekend that the Sudanese government and the two main rebel groups could reach a deal to bring peace to the region, where 200,000 people have been killed and two million more driven into refugee camps.

A deal was almost done at the weekend, in talks between the Sudanese government, which has been accused of fostering genocide in the region, and the two main rebel groups. The agreement would have disarmed the notorious government-backed jangaweed militia and rebel groups, declared the three Darfur regions a transitional region and promised a referendum by 2010 on further autonomy, and offered an annual $200m subsidy to the region. But at the last minute the rebels split, with two factions refusing to sign.

The extension to the talks, in which mediators are shuttling back and forth between the two sides, came after pressure from Washington, where at the weekend a mass rally of protestors including Jewish Holocaust survivors and the Hollywood actor George Clooney took place. It also followed a personal intervention at the talks on Saturday by the Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo who leaned on the rebels to sign.

But few observers expect success from the deadline extension. Yesterday (mon) morning the Sudanese vice president Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, who arrived here three weeks ago and held face-to-face meetings with rebel leaders, left Abjua convinced the rebels were not open to a settlement.

Over the weeks Khartoum, widely portrayed as the villain in Darfur, has played its diplomatic cards cleverly. It agreed to sign on Saturday. The main rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Army, seemed ready too, but a breakaway faction, together with the smaller hardline Justice and Equality Movement refused, leaving the rebels, despite the huge international sympathy for their position, looking like spoilers.

There are two main rebel sticking points. They object to the demand that their troops lay down their arms before they are integrated into the Sudanese army. And they are insisting that a vice president's post in the Khartoum government be given to a Darfurian rather than the No 4 post the draft agreement offered.

But the deal offered them major concessions. It agreed their key demand that Darfur's borders to revert to where they were at independence in 1956, before land was transferred to Northern Sudan by successive governments. And it placed the Transitional Darfur Regional Authority under the control of the SLA and JEM rebels.

Failure of the talks will reflect badly on the African Union which was created three years ago with the idea of "African solutions for African problems". Its credibility has already received a serious blow from the inability of its 7,000 peacekeepers in Darfur to stop the violence in the region. It must now decide whether to hand over its first major peacekeeping operation to the United Nations.

Whether the international community has the stomach for a bigger and better-equipped United Nations force with more aggressive terms-of-engagement is another matter. Despite the celebrity protest in Washington at the weekend, and countless pious expressions of outrage and concern, the UN's World Food Programme has received just one-third of the $746 million it requested from rich countries to feed three million people in Sudan. Unicef has received only one sixth of the money it asked for.

As a result, rations of grain, beans, oil, sugar and salt for the starving people of Darfur are soon to be halved.

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