Jimmy Carter Confronts Sudan Officials

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, second from right, is accompanied by an unidentified senior Sudanese General into the residence of the governor of North Darfur, El Fasher, Darfur, Sudan, Oct. 2, 2007. A group of elder statesmen, including former U.S. President Carter and Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu, urged all sides in Darfur's bloodshed to reach a peace deal as they began touring the region Tuesday. (AP Photo/Alfred de Montesquiou) (Alfred De Montesquiou - AP)

"We are in the security field. We're not that flexible," he said after the confrontation ended.

In an interview with The Associated Press later in the day, Carter played down the encounter, saying the security chief was only doing his job.

"But it's true that I'm not accustomed to people telling me I can't walk down the street and meet people," he told the AP after returning to a United Nations compound in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state.

Branson said some refugees had slipped notes in his pockets.

"We (are) still suffering from the war as our girls are being raped on a daily basis," read one of the notes, translated from Arabic, that Branson handed to the AP.

The note said that on Sept. 26, a group of girls had been raped, one of them a 10-year-old, and that a refugee had been shot two days ago. Branson said it had been handed over by an ethnic African man.

"All (refugees) living in the town of Kabkabiya are vulnerable prisoners who live under injustice and intimidation," the note also said.

For the most part, the refugees here appeared too frightened to speak to the visiting delegation. The single refugee representative Carter managed to meet at the school pleaded with an AP reporter out of earshot of Sudanese security for Carter to ensure he would not face government retaliation. Carter then went back to the man and wrote down his name, assuring him he would look out for his safety.

Most of the community leaders the mission met during its two-day visit to Darfur appeared to be government-vetted, and several ethnic African delegates told AP they had been intimidated by authorities into turning down invitations from "the Elders."

"This illustrates the challenges that communities and humanitarian workers face in Darfur," said Orla Clinton, spokeswoman for the U.N. Mission in Sudan, who witnessed the incident.

More than 200,000 people have been killed since the conflict in the western Sudanese region of Darfur began in 2003 when ethnic African rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government, accusing it of decades of discrimination. Sudan's government is accused of retaliating by unleashing a militia of Arab nomads known as the janjaweed _ a charge it denies.

The visit by "The Elders," which is headed by Nobel Peace Prize laureates Carter and Desmond Tutu, is largely a symbolic move by a host of respected figures to push all sides to make peace.