Ex-Sudan PM Explains Resistance to U.N.

Sudanese opposition leader Sadiq al-Mahdi is pictured during an interview with the Associated Press at his home in the Nasr City suburb of Cairo, Egypt, on Sunday, Feb. 25, 2007. Al-Mahdi claims the Sudanese government is refusing to allow U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur because it knows the U.N. troops would help hunt down war crimes suspects for the International Criminal Court. (AP Photo/Jasper Mortimer) (Jasper Mortimer - AP)

CAIRO, Egypt -- The main Sudanese opposition leader says the government is refusing to allow U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur because it knows the U.N. troops would help hunt down war crimes suspects for the International Criminal Court.

Former Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi said Khartoum's other reason for rejecting U.N. forces was that it still believes it can defeat the Darfur rebels militarily.

In an interview with The Associated Press while visiting Cairo, al-Mahdi challenged the government's official line in the standoff with the U.N. Security Council, which is that it supports the May peace accord and that U.N. forces in Darfur would constitute a "colonialist" attempt to subjugate the country.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is still waiting for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to reply to a Jan. 24 letter that put forward specific proposals for the deployment of 22,000 U.N. and African Union troops to Darfur, the vast western region of Sudan where more than 200,000 have died and 2.5 million people have fled their homes in four years of fighting.

The Security Council initially ordered the deployment in August.

On Tuesday, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court accused a minister of state in al-Bashir's Cabinet, Ahmed Mohammed Harun, of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, saying he paid and recruited militias responsible for murder, rape and torture.

The prosecutor also said the militia concerned, the janjaweed, was armed and financed by the government _ a charge Khartoum has always denied.

The government rejected the prosecutor's remarks and reiterated it would not surrender anybody for trial in the ICC.

Al-Mahdi, whose Umma Party traditionally wins the plurality of votes in Sudan's elections, dismissed the sovereignty argument as inapplicable to gross abuse of human rights.

"Atrocities have been committed and those who committed them have got to be brought to book," al-Mahdi said.

Interviewed in his apartment in the Cairo suburb of Nasr City on Sunday, the man who was twice prime minister said his party, were it to return to government, would cooperate with the ICC and would allow the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur.

Al-Mahdi, whose government was toppled in a 1989 military coup led by al-Bashir, is known to have influence in Darfur. In the 1986 polls _ the last to be considered free and fair _ Umma Party swept Darfur by a landslide.