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Sudan appoints Darfur rebel leader as presidential aide
Khartoum, Aug 5, 2006 Sudan's president on Saturday named the leader of a Darfur rebel faction as a senior aide, meeting a key demand of the group which had accused the government of reneging on its peace deal commitments and threatened to resume fighting in the western region. "President Omar al-Beshir has issued a decree appointing Minni Arku Minnawi as a presidential assistance," Beshir's office. Minnawi's mainstream faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement, which won Western plaudits for signing a hard-won peace deal in May, praised the move. "We welcome the decision and we consider it a positive step," the group's spokesman Mahjoub Hussein told AFP. Minnawi would head to Khartoum on Sunday, Hussein added. Earlier on Saturday, Minnawi had called off his trip to Khartoum after his faction said the government had failed to respect a clause in the Darfur peace deal stipulating the appointment of a nominee of the group as senior presidential assistant. Hussein had said that the government would be blame if the peace deal fell apart, and that the rebels would ask the international community to call Khartoum to account. The spokesman reaffirmed his group's support for the rapid deployment of UN peacekeepers and the prosecution of war crimes suspects by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. "We demand the arrival of UN forces in Darfur as soon as possible and the trial of the perpetrators of warcrimes and humanitarian crimes by the International Criminal Court," he said. The May peace agreement, which was struck in Nigeria after high-level intervention by both London and Washington, was intended to bring an end to the more than three-year-old conflict in Darfur in which some 300,000 people have died and 2.4 million more fled their homes. A minority faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement and the separate Justice and Equality Movement have both refused to sign up to the peace deal. Community Email This Article Comment On This Article Related Links Nuclear Space Technology at Space-Travel.com
Israelis bomb major power station in Lebanon: police
Beirut, Aug 4, 2006 Israeli warplanes Friday bombed a major power station that serves the south of the eastern Bekaa Valley and much of southern Lebanon, police said. |
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