KHARTOUM: Two groups that launched a rebellion against the Sudanese government in the western region of Darfur four years ago have now morphed into dozens of warring gangs, complicating the search for peace amid a profound humanitarian crisis.

Each of these splinter movements wants its own place at the negotiating table, yet the government is refusing to modify the May 2006 peace deal it signed with one of the largest of the original groups.

“You can’t deny the lack of political maturity of the rebels,” said Saleh Mahmud, a communist MP who admits having some sympathy for their cause.

It is that lack of maturity, he says, that has caused an endless series of schisms that have resulted in this plethora of competing, often mutually antagonistic, bands.

“They don’t realise that this fragmentation just weakens their position in negotiations with the government,” added the lawmaker, who is active in human rights causes.

Darfur specialist Suliman Baldo, who once wrote reports on the conflict for the International Crisis Group (ICG), shares Mahmud’s view of the problem.

“One of the rebels’ problems is the lack of experience. As soon as the rebel movement became active, there was a massive military campaign and it never had time to evolve politically,” he said.

“Commanders on the ground cooperate but don’t have a real sense of shared belonging,” he said, adding that the rebels needed to have some sort of reunification meeting to sort out their leadership issues.

The United Nations and the African Union, both struggling to find a political solution to a war that has claimed at least 200,000 lives, have repeatedly emphasised the need for the rebels to present a single representative.

But it is not solely a matter of experience that has pushed the rebels toward fragmentation, but also the diverse tribal and ethnic backgrounds of Darfur’s peoples, including both Arab and black African tribes.

The whole region was actually an independent sultanate in the centuries before 1916.

It was a power struggle at the apex of Sudanese politics that also helped divide the rebels, said Ghazi Suleiman, a member of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, which fought a war with the government in the south for two decades until peace was declared in 2005.

“The conflict in Darfur was influenced by the struggle for power between (President Omar) al-Beshir and Hassan al-Turabi,” he said referring to the ideological father of the current regime, turned opposition leader.

According to Suleiman, who originally hails from Darfur, the leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, Khalil Ibrahim, was a protégé of Turabi and rebelled against the state when his mentor was jailed.

The movement then went on produce two offspring -- Wing Peace, led by Abu Risha and Lazraq, named after its commander.

However, it is the main opposition SLM that has seen the most schisms, beginning when it split in half during the negotiations in Abuja, Nigeria that led to the peace accord.

Minni Minnawi’s faction signed the deal, but another, under founder Abdel Wahed Mohammed Nur, did not. That split could also have its origins in rivalries between the Zaghawa and Fur tribes.

These two factions then gave birth to six more groups. These include Free Will, led by Abdel Rahman Mussa, the Greater Sudan Liberation Movement, something called Group 19, led by Abdel Karim Jar al-Nabi, and at least one more Wing Peace.

Despite these divisions, all the groups agree on the need to renegotiate the peace accord -- something the government categorically refuses to do.

What the United Nations and African Union have been trying to do all this time is find some kind of middle ground between these two apparently implacable positions.—AFP