SIRTE, Libya, Oct. 26 ? On the eve of the much anticipated peace talks for Darfur, United Nations and African Union officials on Friday expressed disappointment that several rebel leaders had not showed up, but they said the talks had to begin anyway.

“Time is on nobody’s side,” said Jan Eliasson, the United Nations’ envoy for Darfur, at a news conference in Sirte, where the talks were to begin Saturday. “We have seen a deterioration on the ground. We have seen frustration and anger in the camps, which is now exploding. We have seen the growing tensions within the government and rebel groups, and now we have to end this vicious circle.”

About 15 men representing half a dozen of Darfur’s rebel factions arrived in Sirte by Friday evening and began to circulate among the meeting halls. Their first order of business, they said, was agreeing to a cease-fire, something United Nations officials said was crucial for these peace talks to work and something the Sudanese government had implied it was willing to consider.

But major rebel figures, including Abdel Wahid el-Nur, a founding father of the rebellion, and Khalil Ibrahim, the commander of one of the strongest rebel armies, had indicated that they would not be coming ? at least for now ? because they did not trust the Sudanese government. That could mean that any deal reached here in Libya might not translate into meaningful change in Darfur, because thousands of rebel fighters would not feel bound by it.

The United Nations and African Union have billed this peace conference as a make-or-break moment for Darfur, the desiccated region of western Sudan that has been consumed by bloodshed and turmoil since 2003. United Nations officials estimate that at least 200,000 people have died and more than two million driven from their homes.

But the talks to end the violence seemed to be stumbling before they began, not just because of the lackluster rebel showing. The Sudanese government has recently stepped up attacks in Darfur, and former rebels in southern Sudan accuse Sudan’s leaders of torpedoing a major peace deal signed in 2005, which is supposedly a model for Darfur.

Another issue is the Qaddafi factor. Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, is playing host to the talks, hoping to build himself a role as a peacemaker in Africa. But some Darfurian rebels do not like him because they say he has a long history of siding with nomadic tribes in Darfur, and most of Darfur’s rebels are not nomads. Last week, Colonel Qaddafi made a cryptic comment in a video conference to students, likening the conflict to a dispute over a camel.

The combined effect has cast such an air of pessimism that conference organizers felt it necessary to downgrade expectations immediately.

“We are not na?ve to believe that once this process has begun it will be rosy,” said Salim Ahmed Salim, the chief African Union negotiator, at the news conference on Friday. But, he added, “We have to do everything humanly possible to facilitate this process.”



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2007/10/26/ST2007102601266.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 27, 2007; Page A08

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.
But 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.

"This is an opportunity" and a responsibility, Eliasson said in Sirte. "If they don't accept this responsibility, the risks are grave."

As many as 450,000 people have died of disease, hunger and violence since rebels in Darfur took up arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government in 2003, accusing it of discrimination and neglect in the vast region of western Sudan. Sudan's government is accused of retaliating by unleashing a militia of Arab nomads known as the Janjaweed -- a charge it denies.

When the peace talks in Libya were announced in September, U.N. and African Union officials called them an opportunity to reach a lasting peace agreement for Darfur. But infighting among the rebel factions soon cast doubt on who would attend. The combatants risk international sanctions if they refuse to participate in the talks.

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."

Many analysts and rebel leaders have said the talks should have been postponed to allow more time for the rebels to agree on a unified negotiating platform. But U.N. and African Union mediators, under considerable international pressure to reach some sort of settlement, have refused.

"What we have now is really a mismanaged mediation effort focused solely on getting a piece of paper signed," said Ted Dagne, African specialist with the Congressional Research Service in Washington.

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."

On the ground in Darfur, meanwhile, the conflict is becoming more complex by the day. The Sudanese government and its allied militias have continued to attack civilians and rebels. Rebels are fighting each other. Recently, one rebel faction attacked a camp of African Union peacekeepers, killing 10 soldiers. Arab tribes that supplied the Janjaweed militias are fighting among themselves.

And in some camps for displaced people, Darfurians have turned increasingly impatient and violent, attacking camp guards and aid workers.

Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi's role as host of the talks marks the recognition he long has sought as a legitimate world leader. Libya is emerging from decades of international sanctions imposed in part over the country's alleged sponsorship of terrorist groups.

Yet de Waal and other regional experts said that Gaddafi's armed intervention in Chad in the 1980s directly contributed to the conflict in neighboring Darfur.

And Gaddafi and many other Arab leaders continue to play down the conflict as a dispute between tribes.

"It is a fight over a camel, and now it has become an international issue," Gaddafi told a group of British students this week.

McCrummen reported from Nairobi.