By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Aug 6 2007 (IPS)

Leaders of Darfur’s fractious rebel groups have settled on a common negotiating position following a four-day round of talks in Tanzania, United Nations and African Union mediators announced Monday.

The rebels hope this unified position will allow peace talks with the government of Sudan to begin within two to three months, U.N. special envoy to Darfur Jan Elliason said.

But the absence of key rebel leaders from the talks may limit the significance of this latest agreement, some analysts warned.

“It’s a step forward, but the real work is yet to be done,” Alex de Waal, a Darfur expert at the Social Science Research Council, told IPS.

The talks, which were held in the Tanzanian city of Arusha from Aug. 3-6, came less than a week after the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution establishing the world’s largest peacekeeping mission in Darfur.

Elliason and Salim Ahmed Salim, the African Union envoy, stated that the negotiations had produced a common platform on “power sharing, wealth sharing, security arrangements, land/hawakeer [the lands of a particular clan or ethnic group] and humanitarian issues,” although de Waal cautioned that the substance of the position still needs to be hammered out.

But two leading figures, Suleiman Jamous and Abdel Wahid Mohammed al-Nur, were not present in Arusha, and experts say that their absence does not bode well for the success of the talks.

Jamous, the humanitarian coordinator of the SLA and a much-admired figure among the rebels, has been held in de facto custody at a U.N. hospital in the Sudan for over a year. The Sudanese government has threatened to arrest him if he leaves the hospital.

“Jamous has achieved something of a profile for his highly conciliatory nature, his elder statesman qualities, the fact that he has no blood on his hands,” Eric Reeves, an academic who has written widely about the Sudan, told IPS before the talks began.

“His presence would be extremely important, and he can play a conciliatory role. But it is just for that reason that [the] Khartoum [government] keeps him in prison.”

One of the biggest rebel groups, SLA-Unity, had threatened to boycott the talks if Jamous was not allowed to attend, although Reuters reported that they eventually relented.

Al-Nur, the founding chairman of the SLA, was also absent from the negotiations. His absence, however, was a personal choice.

On Friday, al-Nur criticised the talks in an interview with the Sudan Tribune, saying that “the mediators speak about rebel unity, but in fact they encourage rebels’ divisions because they invite anyone with a gun, a vehicle, and a satellite telephone to attend.”

Although al-Nur now lives in Paris and no longer commands many troops in Darfur, he remains a widely respected figure among the 2.5 million people displaced by the conflict.

“Nur is still regarded by most in the [displaced-persons] camps as the voice of the displaced,” Reeves told IPS on Thursday. “It would be very difficult for the meetings to be a success if he boycotts them.”

Reeves also warned that “it would be the recipe for the kind of failure we saw in the Abuja settlement if you take only a minority, or even a large plurality, of the rebel groups and seek to make an agreement.”

The May 2006 peace deal brokered between rebels and the Sudanese government in Abuja, Nigeria, was signed by only one major rebel group – the faction of the SLA led by Minni Minawi – and quickly became a dead letter.

This weekend’s negotiations came only days after the Security Council unanimously passed a resolution to deploy a “hybrid” United Nations/African Union mission to Darfur comprising 26,000 peacekeepers. The mission would replace a 7,000-person African Union force that has widely been viewed as ineffective.

Although many Darfur advocacy groups were cautiously optimistic about the resolution’s passage, critics charged that the timeframe for deploying the force is unacceptably slow and that the resolution had been significantly weakened to secure Chinese approval.

Jan Pronk, a former U.N. envoy to the Sudan who was expelled from the country in October 2006 for criticizing the Khartoum government, expressed concerns about the resolution on Saturday.

In an interview with the Dutch daily Trouw, Pronk said that the resolution had been watered down “enormously,” and noted that the peacekeepers would be unable to seize and dispose of illegal arms.

Pronk also echoed complaints about the slow deployment timeframe, saying that “it will take a very long time before that mission is fully operational.”

The conflict in Darfur began in February 2003, when members of the region’s ethnic African tribes took up arms against what they saw as decades of neglect and discrimination by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum.

Since then, a government-sponsored campaign of displacement, rape, and murder perpetrated by the Janjaweed militias has claimed up to 450,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people, according to the United Nations and the African Union.

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