WASHINGTON (ABP) — Peace talks aimed at ending what the United States government and international human-rights groups have labeled “genocide” in Darfur faltered May 2, just days after thousands of protesters rallied in Washington for beefed-up measures to help the people of the Sudanese region.
President Bush called Sudan's leader April 1, and the State Department's number-two official flew to Africa for on-site diplomacy the next day — all in an effort to end a logjam at talks between Sudanese officials and representatives of three Darfurian rebel groups.
Assistant Secretary of State Robert Zoellick joined other international mediators at the African Union-brokered peace talks in Abuja, Nigeria. AU officials had extended the talks' deadline, originally set for midnight April 30, after the rebel groups declined to approve an agreement to which Sudanese officials had consented.
Darfur, a large, arid province on the western side of the war-torn nation, has suffered for more than three years as the result of a civil war between the rebel groups — made up mostly of black African residents — and Sudanese Arab militias, known as janjaweed.
The janajaweed — which most international human-rights groups agree have been backed by the Arab-led Darfur government — have repeatedly murdered large groups of black residents in the region, burned farms and villages, and committed other atrocities. Human-rights agencies estimate that 100,000-300,000 black Darfurians have died, and at least a million more have been forced into exile. Many of those are subjected to inhumane conditions at refugee camps within Darfur itself or in neighboring Chad.
Both the black Darfurians and the Sudanese Arabs are overwhelmingly Muslim. The black rebel groups have complained that the Arab-led Islamist government in Khartoum ignores the needs of the region's black residents.
African Union troops have been attempting, with little success, to act as peacekeepers in the region. Many Western organizations and government officials have called for the United Nations or NATO forces to augment the beleaguered African Union peacekeepers.
If the peace talks fail — the deadline was extended until midnight Abuja time on May 2, and may be extended once more — then Darfur will almost certainly be in for more misery, said one African Union official.
“Nobody will look good — the AU, the government or the [rebel] movements — but the real victims will be the people on the ground,” said Sam Ibok, head of the union's mediation team, according to Reuters. “They will not be able to return to their homes to cultivate their lands. They will have to spend more time in camps. Security will deteriorate. Women will continue to be exposed to rape, and children will continue to suffer.”
The mediation deadline was highlighted by protests around the world April 30. In Washington, an estimated 10,000-15,000 protesters, representing widely divergent ideologies, gathered at a rally on the National Mall to urge Bush and other Western leaders to devote more muscle to ending the conflict.
“The world policy on Sudan is failing,” actor George Clooney, who recently returned from a visit to the refugee camps in the region, told the crowd. “If we turn our heads and look away and hope it will all go away, then they will — and an entire generation will disappear.”
Besides Clooney — known for his high-profile liberal activism — speakers at the rally included leaders as diverse as Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington.
The diverse coalition of groups backing more action on Darfur is one of the most politically and religiously diverse to arise since the protests against the racist apartheid policies of the South African government in the 1980s. The Washington rally was sponsored by a coalition of more than 160 organizations that included Muslim, evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, Jewish, Catholic and secular advocacy groups.
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