Sudan may deny that its army cooperates with the Arab militia at the heart of the Darfur conflict, but in Tine, on the border with Chad, little trouble is taken to hide the fact. The militiamen, known locally as Janjaweed, arrived in Tine last week and set up base jointly with the Sudanese army to protect the strategic site against attack by Darfur rebels. Heavy gunfire day and night keeps African Union peacekeepers on the alert, and vehicles packed with shouting soldiers tear along dirt tracks. | “Here in Tine it is very clear that the Janjaweed are working hand in hand with the government troops who are here,” said Thomas Chaona, acting commander in the Tine sector of the AU force struggling to monitor a notional truce in remote western Sudan. |
Khartoum armed the mainly Arab militiamen in early 2003 to quell a revolt in Darfur by mostly non-Arab rebels. The Janjaweed stand accused of a campaign of rape, murder and pillage which Washington calls genocide, a term Sudan rejects. Under an AU-brokered peace deal signed in May with only one of three negotiating rebel factions, Khartoum promised to disarm the Janjaweed, by October 22. But one day after the deadline, about 1,000 Janjaweed rode into Tine, terrifying the few hundred residents, who fled across the border to Chad.
The militiamen denied AU requests to meet their commander and blocked the road to town, which ran past their base. A Sudanese army source denied there were any Janjaweed in Sudan. “These are border intelligence troops, a force created one year and three months ago,” he said. But the ragged youths, many in civilian clothes with rifles slung across their shoulders, did not resemble trained intelligence troops.