Former Darfur rebels said yesterday they have stopped implementing a peace deal until the government honours a promise to make Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) leader Minni Arcua Minnawi a special presidential assistant.
Minnawi was supposed to arrive in Khartoum yesterday to kickstart the post-peace reconstruction of Darfur but refused to show up. An SLA official told reporters waiting at the airport that the rebel leader would not come until he was appointed.
"The government is not serious about this peace and Minni will not come to Khartoum until this decree is issued from the presidency appointing him as assistant to the president," said al-Fadil al-Tijani, the SLA deputy head of political affairs.
"All technical committees have stopped work," he said. The SLA was the only one out of three rebel groups to have signed the peace deal, although Minnawi has said he does not trust the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) who signed the deal with him. Thousands of police, army and rooftop snipers had been stationed in the expectation that protests against the unpopular deal would greet Minnawi's arrival.
But only a few hundred people, mostly school children and university students, had gathered in Khartoum's Green Square for the welcome. Most were annoyed Minnawi has wasted their time.
"They've been saying for weeks now that he's coming tomorrow, next week and today all this and he's still not here?" said Noureddine Siddig Adam from North Darfur.
"I won't bother to come next time."
Minnawi's triumph of peace has been clouded by allegations that his troops tortured opponents and intensified attacks against other rebel groups who did not sign the accord.
He denies the accusations but some attacks and torture have been confirmed by the African Union monitoring a shaky truce in the region.
Many Darfuris reject the deal signed by Minnawi saying they want more compensation for war victims, political posts and crucially a rebel role in monitoring the disarmament of Arab militias known as Janjaweed blamed for much of the rape and pillage in Darfur.
"This peace deal will be as much of a failure as today's celebration was," added Farid el-Nur Adam from West Darfur.
As SLA spokesman Mahjoub Hussein told the crowd in Khartoum why Minnawi was not coming, the only cheer he got was from his declaration of complete support for the immediate deployment of UN troops to Darfur, which the NCP opposes. "We welcome the... immediate deployment of international troops to Darfur," he said.
The crowd burst into spontaneous applause. The NCP dominates parliament and government and compares a UN takeover of a struggling African Union mission in Darfur to a Western attempt to colonise Sudan.
Almost all other political parties and tens of thousands of Darfuris have expressed their support for a UN force. Critics say the NCP fears UN troops may be used to arrest officials likely to be indicted by the International Criminal Court investigating alleged war crimes in the region. The two institutions are separate.