KHARTOUM, April 4: Sudan and the United Nations were at loggerheads on Tuesday over Darfur after a top UN envoy accused Khartoum of trying to cover up ongoing violence in the troubled region of western Sudan. The authorities prevented chief humanitarian coordinator Jan Egeland from visiting Darfur, sparking the most serious crisis between the two sides since it became clear that the UN was aiming to take over peacekeeping operations from the embattled African Union (AU).

“I believe the government does not want me to see what is going on in Darfur,” Egeland said on Monday.

“I wanted to go to a place where tens of thousands of people were displaced.”

Washington, which has labelled the brutal repression by the government and its Janjaweed militia proxies of the three-year-old Darfur rebellion a genocide, said the incident was “deeply disturbing”.

“There is a crying humanitarian need to address in Darfur. And that’s why it’s so hard to understand why a government would refuse to allow a senior UN official responsible for providing relief to a region to help its own citizens,” said State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli.

The main Darfur rebel movement charged that Khartoum was systematically obstructing “any attempts to discover and understand what is actually happening on the ground in Darfur.

“The regime will do whatever it can to prevent people from making reports that could strengthen the case for sending UN troops in Darfur,” Sudan Liberation Movement spokesman Mahjub Hussein said.—AFP