Monday, September 27, 2004

Darfur misery has complex roots - the political arguments and suffering of the people are set to continue

Reporting from the Chad-Sudan border, BBC World Affairs correspondent Mark Doyle describes the border region between Chad and Sudan as being one of the harshest and most remote environments on earth.

"There is no ideal place to have a refugee crisis but as locations go this is surely among the worst," he says.

According to his latest report, "Darfur misery has complex roots", the politics of the crisis show how difficult the situation will be to resolve - the political arguments, and the suffering of the people of the border area, are set to continue.

Seems the Governor of West Darfur, Sulieman Abdala Adan, said the most serious problems were not generated by the SLA but by a second rebel movement, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). It was the JEM, Governor Adan said, who had sabotaged all of the attempts at brokering peace. He accused the JEM of being the "military wing" of the Popular Congress, the opposition movement that was over the weekend accused by the government of mounting a coup attempt in Khartoum.

In a BBC radio interview, UN refugee chief Mr Lubbers, floated the idea of limited autonomy for the Darfur region within the framework of a sovereign Sudanese state. Some Sudanese officials cautiously welcomed the idea in public. But in private other senior figures were said to be extremely irritated by Mr Lubbers' intervention, saying it was not his role to make such controversial political suggestions.

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