Militiamen prevent return home of Sudan refugees to Darfur area

GENEINA, Sudan -- Armed militiamen surged into a western border area where some Darfur refugees attempted to return to their raided village, U.N. security officials said Sunday, raising further concern about how quickly 1.4 million displaced Sudanese could return home safely.\nU.N. authorities were sending a team to the area to assess the risks to refugees, said West Darfur U.N. refugee security officer Sabir Mughal.\nSudanese authorities told U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers they were calming the 19 months of bloodletting in Darfur. The region's non-Arab African villagers and international leaders blame the crisis -- which the United States has labeled genocide -- largely on government-backed Arab militias known as Janjaweed.\nSome of the nearly 200,000 refugees who fled into neighboring Chad were starting to return home, Social Affairs Minister Habib Mouktoun told Lubbers, "and we are welcoming them."\nBut the movement of armed militia, reported by U.N. refugee security authorities around the border village of Abu Surug, could jeopardize efforts to convince refugees they can safely go home. "A few" refugees from Chad returned to the Abu Surug area a few days ago, and the still-unidentified militia moved in after them, Mughal said.\nSudan, Africa's largest country, is under review by the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions on its oil industry over what the United States, European Parliament and some others say is genocide by the government and Janjaweed -- or "Men on Horseback" -- in Darfur.\nViolence broke out when two non-Arab Darfur rebel movements took up arms in February 2003 against government installations, saying they wanted a bigger share of power and Sudan's resources. More than 50,000 people have been killed in what the United Nations says is the world's worst humanitarian crisis.\nIn the capital, Khartoum, the Sudanese Interior Ministry said a police unit guarding Kulma camp in South Darfur province for the displaced was attacked Sunday morning. Two policemen were killed and several others were wounded, it said.\nThe ministry called the attack a "serious development."\nAlso, West Darfur Gov. Abdalla Sulieman Adam linked one of the rebel movements, the Justice and Equality Movement, to what the government says was a foiled coup plot Friday in Khartoum. The rebel movement, which is the armed wing of opposition group the Popular Congress Party, "is trying to bring international intervention and overthrow the government," Adam said after a weekend of stepped-up military patrols in Khartoum.\nAt Sudan's western border, the U.N. report of militia movement threatened to be a first test of whether Darfur was safe again for non-Arab African villagers.\nLubbers said he saw improvement but when asked if he believed it was safe for refugees to go home, he said it was not.\n"We are not in a process of return," Lubbers said at the Sudan government's Riyad camp, outside the state capital. "We are in a process of reducing violence."\nEven at the camp, men and women said beatings, thefts and rapes took place on a daily or weekly basis whenever they ventured just beyond the edges.\nViolence made any hope of return out of the question and transit to the safer, better-equipped internationally run refugee camps in Chad a dream, said Nosra Suliman Hakkar, a 40-year-old mother of seven whose husband disappeared when militia attacked her village nine months ago.\n"If we leave the camp, we die," Hakkar said.\nU.N. security officials in Darfur cited other alleged instances of continuing unrest, showing a photograph of a wounded, bandaged 2-year-old boy. Villagers said Janjaweed militia threw the boy into the flames of his home when they torched his village of Jebal Marra last week, said Berhame Nagga, U.N. protection officer for West Darfur.\nNagga said he visited the burned village and the destruction appeared to have occurred recently.\nSudan officials say they are doing everything to restore calm, including arresting what Adam, the governor, called "armed gangs" behind some attacks.\nU.N. authorities are anxious to see peace restored enough to allowed Darfur's people to return from within and outside the country -- fearing, in part, rising tensions in Chad if there is a new refugee flow.\nRelief workers across the border in Chad say the Sudanese government is trying to dissuade Darfur's people from crossing the border by telling them via radio campaigns and local chiefs that there was no food for them in Chad.\nRefugees and relief workers also report Janjaweed patrols blocking any escape route between Darfur villages and the Chad border.\n"The last thing the Sudan government wants is a big flow of refugees, because that would be a clear indication that the attacks are continuing," said Eduardo Cue, a spokesman for the U.N. relief agency's operations here.