Letter from JEM/NRF to UN SRSG Jan Pronk

On Friday Sep 29, 2006 Sudan's insurgent group JEM attacked and mortar bombed SLA-Minnawi forces near Greida, South Darfur - 40 killed.

The day before, JEM Leader Khalil Ibrahim, co-founder of NRF, published the following letter to Jan Pronk, UN special representative to Sudan, dated Thursday Sep 28 [via Sudan.net]

Dear Sir;

Thank you very much for your letter dated September 22nd 06. We respond to your Excellency with Ramadan greetings; greetings of piety, charity, peace and reflection. As an honour to the holy month of Ramadan, we are pleased to respond positively to your appeal and dedicate this festive month for peace and tranquillity for our people in Darfur. We seek this opportunity to reconfirm to you that our forces on the ground are clearly instructed all through not to act except in situations of self-defence and that instruction will be closely watched during the holy month. We hope that our adversaries will behave likewise.

As for your call to use this month for dialogue for peace, it is our conviction that the problem of Darfur is essentially political and can at best be resolved through peaceful negotiations. Military confrontation has never been our first choice and we look forward to dropping the gun out of the politics of Sudan all together. We are ready for a call from your office for resumption of peaceful settlement of Darfur conflict, any time, any where. The people of Darfur have suffered too much. They cannot wait any longer.

Sincerely yours;
[signed]
Dr. Khalil Ibrahim Mohamed
Chairman JEM
Co-founder of NRF

Good guys or what?