08 August 2004	Sunday	21 Jamadi-us-Saani 1425

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 7: A United Nations Human rights expert on Friday called upon the Sudanese government to take quick action to disarm irregular forces and protect its people in Darfur.

The Sudanese government has finalised an agreement reached earlier this week between its foreign minister and the senior United Nations envoy to the country, paving the way for Khartoum to take concrete steps in the next 30 days to disarm the militias accused of conducting deadly attacks against civilians in the troubled Darfur region.

"The extra-judicial killings of civilians in western and southern Sudan have been mainly coordinated by the national military and militias backed by the Khartoum Government", said UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings Asma Jahangir's in a report released on Friday.

Ms Jehangir issued the report after her team's two-week investigation of the deaths and displacement in Darfur in the west and the Shilook Kingdom in the south in June.

Her report was released just before a UN spokesman announced that the Sudanese Government had finalied an agreement reached earlier this week between its Foreign Minister, Osman Ismail, and the senior United Nations envoy to the country, Jan Pronk, to disarm the militias.

Ms Jehangir held an open meeting of representatives of Darfur's Arab and African militias in Khartoum. According to the report, both sides acknowledged that the Government had given them weapons, but had given the Arabs more.

"It appeared that the distribution of arms to these tribes and the amounts distributed was common knowledge," she writes.

The National Armed Forces are the country's main defence, but the Government is empowered to recruit volunteer Popular Defence Forces (PDF) to assist regular forces. A senior PDF officer in El-Fashir "assured me that it would not be difficult to disarm the PDF as the Government kept records of the arms distributed and was formally in command of the PDF," Ms. Jahangir says.

The slow pace of the Government's response to its own citizens'cries for help for many years showed either "complete disrespect for the right to life," especially in Darfur, or, "at worst, complicity in the events," Ms. Jahangir observes.

The conflict between the Government and both African areas - in the south and west - had a common factor. "In both rebellions, economic grievances are a factor and similar tactics are often used by the Government in its response, notably sponsoring militias (apart from the defence forces) to fight the rebels and, more distressingly, to terrorise and kill civilians suspected of supporting the rebels," she concludes.

After having held talks in Khartoum, the three states of Darfur and Upper Nile State, as well as in Nairobi, Kenya, and Cairo, Egypt, she sent Sudan's Permanent Mission to the UN a copy of her findings.

The Government failed to offer a response, according to the report.

Ms Jahangir says many of the people she interviewed recalled that the cries for help from Darfur had gone out for several years. Clashes between Arab nomads and sedentary African farmers since the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s were noted by a previous UN rapporteur in 1997.