Will meetings on Darfur and Sudan's political future result in panacea for the war-torn country's many ills? Gamal Nkrumah sounds out the warring parties In the whole of Africa there is no battlefield more blood-soaked than Darfur. And members of the Sudanese opposition groups are meeting in Cairo next week to discuss Darfur and other domestic Sudanese affairs. The talks are sponsored by the Egyptian government. In Kenya, Sudanese Vice-President Ali Othman Mohamed Taha and John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), resumed peace talks in Kenya this week. In the meantime, the Sudanese opposition groups, including those of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the umbrella opposition organisation grouping the SPLA, are meeting in Cairo to iron out differences. Mohamed Othman Al-Mirghani, head of the NDA and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), announced that the NDA will meet on 17 October in Al-Qanater Al- Khairiya, a resort 20kms north of Cairo. No less than 100 NDA representatives will be participating in the NDA conference as delegates will be flying in from destinations as far afield as Eritrea, Europe and the United States. The meeting will discuss preparations for the NDA-Sudanese government conference scheduled to take place in Cairo on 21 October. Farouk Abu Issa, the former head of the Cairo-based Arab Lawyers Union and official spokesman for the NDA, said that around 45 leading NDA figures will be attending the Cairo conference. "Topping the agenda will be issues of political reform in Sudan, the pace of democratisation and a return to multi-party democracy. Human rights will also feature prominently," the Cairo- based Abu Issa told Al-Ahram Weekly. The Kenya talks take place under the auspices of the Inter-Governmental Authority for Development (IGAD), a regional organisation which groups seven East African countries, including Sudan. Kenya was mandated by IGAD to act as chief mediator. Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki's special envoy to Sudan Lieutenant General Lazaro Sumbeiywo acts as chief mediator in the Sudanese peace talks. "I'm not very optimistic about the outcome of the Cairo talks nor of the Kenya talks," Ibrahim Al-Nur Ibrahim, director of the office of African studies at the American University in Cairo, told the Weekly. "The Sudanese government is not very serious. They don't realise the gravity of the situation. The government is trying to buy time. Sudan is in grave danger of disintegration and fragmentation." Topping the NDA agenda would be the Darfur crisis. Concerted international efforts to revive the stalled peace talks in the Nigerian capital Abuja between the Sudanese government on the one hand and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) on the other, received a boost with the visit to Sudan last week by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. But, it is not yet clear if SLA President Abdel-Wahid Mohamed Nur Mousa and SLA Secretary-General Mani Minawi are to join other NDA leaders in Cairo next week. The SLA is a fully-fledged member of the NDA. In a separate development, the opposition Islamist Popular Congress Party (PCP), headed by the incarcerated chief Islamist ideologue Hassan Al-Turabi, announced that Al-Haj Adam had fled the country. Adam, who has been in hiding in Sudan for the past month, was accused by the Sudanese government of instigating rebellion in Darfur and plotting a coup designed to topple the regime of Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir. The PCP did not say where Adam had fled to, but it is suspected that he sought refuge in a neighbouring African country. Adam, who hails from southern Darfur, is suspected by the Sudanese authorities of fomenting trouble among the restive indigenous people of the war-torn region. Darfur borders Libya, Chad and the Central African Republic but it is said that Adam is planning to flee eventually to Europe. And the PCP stands accused by the Sudanese government of stirring up trouble in Darfur. Al-Turabi in particular is blamed for the escalation of violence in Darfur. The Sudanese government has clamped down hard on members of the PCP and jailed Al-Turabi who was recently moved from the notorious Cooper Prison in Khartoum to the Bahari Prison, also in Khartoum, but which has a relatively healthier atmosphere. However, Al-Turabi's wife, Wisal Al- Mahdi, expressed concern about the health of her son Siddig Al-Turabi, 42, who now languishes in Port Sudan's dreaded Black Prison, where Sudan's most hardened criminals are jailed. "Conditions in the Black Prison are terribly unhygienic," Al-Mahdi told the Weekly. "The food there is atrocious and my son had two serious bouts of food poisoning. "We are arranging for relatives in Port Sudan to send him home-cooked meals and fresh fruit before the onset of Ramadan." The deputy secretary-general of the PCP, Ali Al-Haj, told the Weekly that his party regreted its alliance with the Sudanese government in 1989 when they plotted a coup together to overthrow the popularly-elected government of former Sudanese Prime Minister Sadig Al-Mahdi. "We should never have aligned ourselves with Al-Bashir," Al-Haj told the Weekly. "We concede that we made a grave mistake in 1989 and we do not wish to repeat the same mistake by plotting another coup today. "We want a fresh start for Sudan. We want the current regime to be toppled by a popular uprising. We want democracy and popular participation," he added. Al-Haj denied Sudanese government accusations that the PCP is embroiled in a coup plot. Al-Haj, based in Bonn, Germany, is the effective leader of the PCP abroad. The seasoned Sudanese politician was in the Eritrean capital Asmara two months ago and met leaders of the NDA. The PCP is not a member of the NDA but Al-Haj said, "we agree with 80 per cent of the NDA's agenda. We are for a peaceful resolution to the Sudanese political crisis. We believe that the Darfur crisis is essentially political in nature. "We, more than our brethren in the NDA, know how evil the Sudanese government is. We know the tricks and machinations of the government because we had the misfortune of working with it. We know what they are up to. And it's no good."
