Darfur, 10 Oct. (AKI) - A top United Nations peacekeeping official met with a Sudanese rebel leader in a bid to bring peace to the war-torn region.Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Alain Le Roy met in El-Fasher, North Darfur, with Minni Minawi, leader of the Sudan Liberation Army, one of the rebel factions that have been fighting Government forces and allied Janjaweed militiamen for the past five years.The UN-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur or UNAMID gave no details of Le Roy’s talks with Minnawi, who met with Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Taha last month, announcing they were turning a new page in their commitment to full implementation of the Darfur Peace Agreement, and the formation of a joint military committee to ensure an end to all hostilities.Le Roy is on his first official visit to Sudan’s Darfur region, where the world body is slated to field its largest mission in an effort to stem a conflict that has already killed some 300,000 people directly or from resulting disease and malnutrition, and uprooted than 2.7 million others.The SLA signed the Darfur Peace Agreement with the Government two years ago but other rebel factions have yet to do so. In August the military chief of UNAMID, General Martin Luther Agwai warned that the splintered rebel movements must unite at the negotiating table if there is to be a lasting solution to the conflict. UNAMID was deployed at the beginning of 2008 and will become the largest UN peacekeeping operation with some 26,000 personnel at full strength.Le Roy has already visited Southern Sudan where the Organisation is fielding a separate operation – the 10,000-strong UN Mission in Sudan monitoring a 2005 peace agreement that ended the 21-year-long north-south civil war, which killed at least 2 million people and displaced 4.5 million others.
