U.S. and European media

November 18, 2022

Reuters: Darfur rebels to go to Qatar for peace consultation. A powerful rebel group on Monday said it was ready to discuss Qatar-sponsored peace plans for the Darfur conflict, signaling a possible softening of its stance toward the initiative. Senior commanders from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) earlier this month said they would not attend a proposed peace conference in Doha and demanded instead one-to-one talks with Sudan's government. But a spokesman for the insurgents on Monday said the group would send a delegation to Doha for "consultation" with the Qatari leadership.

The following editorial appeared in Sunday's San Antonio Express-News. 

Forget about a cease-fire: it's the genocide, stupid

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has announced an immediate, unconditional cease-fire between his government's armed forces and warring factions in Darfur. He also pledged to disarm the Janjaweed militias that have done much of the dirty work of ethnic cleansing in the Western region of Sudan.

It would be nice to believe that the words "immediate" and "unconditional" have meaning to al-Bashir. Unfortunately, he has such a long track record of duplicity and lethal deception that there's no reason to trust him.

In fact, al-Bashir's own announcement made clear that the cease-fire wasn't immediate and did have conditions -- an effective monitoring mechanism must be in place to verify the cease-fire from all sides. Of course, it's al-Bashir who has effectively blocked the deployment of more than half the U.N. authorized force of 26,000 peacekeepers.

The rebels fighting against the government -- who have rarely demonstrated much concern for the welfare of the people of Darfur -- aren't helping matters. A key anti-government group rejected the cease-fire out of hand, calling for a comprehensive peace deal that guarantees its rights.

Such a deal is, at this point, even more remote than the deployment of the entire peacekeeping force.

More than 300,000 people have died and another 2.5 million have been driven from their homes during the five-year, genocidal campaign in Darfur.

Cease-fire or no, the rebels should agree and the international community should demand that al-Bashir end his scorched-earth policy of targeting civilians.

The Darfur Daily News is a service of the Save Darfur Coalition. To subscribe to the Daily News, please email [email protected]. For media inquiries, please contact Ashley Roberts at (202) 478-6181, or [email protected].