From the Washington Post:
Darfur Rebels Balk At Talks in Libya – washingtonpost.com
SIRTE, Libya, Oct. 27 — Mediators from around the world struggled late Friday to salvage talks to end the four-year conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan after at least one leading rebel group pulled out on the eve of negotiations.
A dozen other armed blocs in Darfur’s splintered rebel movement have threatened a boycott as well, saying rebels need to resolve feuds among themselves before talking to their chief enemy, the Sudanese government.
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…it remained unclear whether rebels would take part in enough numbers to give Sudan’s envoys a credible counterpart on the other side of the negotiating table when the talks open Saturday. Mediators began to lose hope that the talks would start with both sides signing a cease-fire agreement.
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Rebels have given various reasons for boycotting: that they need more time to unify their negotiating platform, that they do not trust Libya, that they do not trust the Sudanese government, and, in some cases, that they do not trust one another.
As of Saturday morning, at least one key rebel group was sticking to its boycott: the Justice and Equality Movement, which was one of the first groups to take up arms.
One key rebel leader, Abdul Wahid al-Nur, the founder of the Sudan Liberation Movement, said that he did not recognize most of the other rebel leaders as legitimate and that any peace agreement would be meaningless unless security was established in Darfur first.
"I am not going to Libya, never," al-Nur said by phone from Paris, where he lives in exile. "I’m working for a real peace. The difference between us and the international community is that they are starting from the second step — conflict resolution. We want to start from the first step — security. Without security, the whole process will collapse."
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Other analysts have said that paradoxically, the world attention on Darfur has created another problem: a plethora of would-be peacemakers, all of whom have different ideas for how to resolve the crisis. Those vying for a role include the U.N. envoy, the African Union envoy, the U.S. envoy, the Eritrean government, the Egyptian government and now Libya.
"There is a problem of having so many international stakeholders on board," said Alex de Waal, a researcher on African issues who has written extensively about Darfur. "It’s become international public property — every single international organization is going to have some representative there, and getting the whole process to change direction is like turning around an oil tanker. It’s not going to happen."
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