Darfur Rebels Balk At Talks in Libya

Some Leaders Won't Attend, Dimming Hopes

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.

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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.

Exerting increasing pressure as the talks grew near, envoys from the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union and the United States managed to persuade all but one key bloc to send at least lower-ranking representatives to the talks in the Libyan city of Sirte, Jan Eliasson, the U.N. envoy for Darfur, told reporters late Friday.

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.