KHARTOUM (AFP) — The Sudanese military said on Sunday that troops clashed with thieves in Darfur as the Khartoum regime vowed to flush bandits out of the violence-torn region regardless of a ceasefire.
Rebel commanders accused Sudan of bombing North Darfur after President Omar al-Beshir announced a ceasefire on Wednesday in a series of measures designed to stall legal proceedings against him for alleged war crimes.
But army spokesman Brigadier General Mohamed Osman al-Aghbash was quoted by the Arabic version of the online Sudan Media Centre -- considered close to the intelligence services -- as saying the army clashed with "thieves."
"A convoy of humanitarian trucks was hijacked by thieves in the Kurbia area. The army intervened and started clashing with the thieves. The hijackers ran away and the army lost no troops," he was quoted as saying.
Sudan denied the air strikes that rebels said struck the Kurbia area on Friday and insisted that all subsequent operations would be self-defence only.
Mohammed Mandour el-Mahadi, a senior member of Beshir's ruling National Congress Party (NCP), drew a distinction between rebel movements, with whom Sudan declared the unilateral ceasefire, and operations against bandits.
"The others -- the bandits on the streets -- will they be part of that ceasefire? I don't think so. If you have a thief in Darfur, you have to confront the thief in Darfur. So they are not part of that," he told reporters.
"We are just speaking about the rebel movements, but the others have to be fought by the government and they have to cleaned out of the streets of Darfur," added Mahadi, of the NCP's political affairs secretariat.
Although two Darfur rebel groups initially rose up against the government in February 2003, the conflict has mushroomed into a hugely complex web of violence fought between myriad groups and marred increasingly by banditry.
Darfur rebel commanders told AFP that Antonovs bombed around the Kurbia area of North Darfur on Friday, in a "clear violation" of the ceasefire they reject as a propaganda stunt.
The UN-led peacekeeping mission said on Sunday that it had hoped to send an investigative team on Monday to verify what exactly happened.
"We are in the process in conducting an investigation by sending a team over there to verify what has happened, what kind of weapons were used and hopefully to reach who did what," said a spokesman Ali Hamati.
Although the joint African Union-United Nations mission (UNAMID) is supposed to be the largest UN peacekeeping force in the world with a final strength of 26,000, deployment is expected to reach only 12,613 by the year-end.
Sudan wants the African Union and United Nations to establish an effective mechanism to observe the ceasefire, and put pressure on the rebels to accept.
Khartoum has sought to stall legal proceedings since the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in July demanded an arrest warrant for Beshir on 10 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.
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