VZCZCXRO4764
RR RUEHGI RUEHMA RUEHROV
DE RUEHNJ #0564/01 1870923
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
R 060923Z JUL 07
FM AMEMBASSY NDJAMENA
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 5495
INFO RUCNFUR/DARFUR COLLECTIVE
RUEHTRO/AMEMBASSY TRIPOLI 0419

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 NDJAMENA 000564 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SENSITIVE 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PREL PHUM CD SU
SUBJECT: CHAD/SUDAN:  ROUNDING UP DARFUR REBELS 
 
REF: NDJAMENA 517 
 
NDJAMENA 00000564  001.2 OF 003 
 
 
¶1.  (SBU) SUMMARY:  The funeral and associated traditional 
mourning customs for President Deby's son tied up key players 
in Ndjamena, with the result that the Center for Humanitarian 
Dialogue (CHD) still does not have Chadian approval for a 
flight to take Darfur rebels to Mombasa.  CHD is focusing its 
efforts on flying field officers from the splinter groups of 
the SLM to Mombasa, while keeping in close contact with the 
external political leaders and hoping to rope them in as 
well.  CHD sees JEM and other groups as less important.  A 
local JEM official told us that JEM continues to endorse the 
effort to pull the SLM together but does not predict success. 
 END SUMMARY. 
 
¶2.  (SBU) CHD's Theo Murphy was in Chad for several days 
attempting to get Chadian approval for SLM field officers to 
travel from Darfur to Abeche and for an aircraft to pick them 
up in Abeche to take them to the CHD-organized conference in 
Mombasa.  The timing was difficult because President Deby and 
his senior leadership have been traveling (AU summit) or 
consumed with the funeral for Deby's eldest son Brahim 
(murdered July 2 in France, buried July 4 in Ndjamena, with 
Qadhafi and CAR's President Bozize in attendance).  Murphy 
was armed with a request (or at least acquiescence) from the 
UN/AU.  He expects the approval to be forthcoming as soon as 
the higher-ups in Chad have a moment to spare.  (Comment: 
Alternatively, CHD is being given a polite brush-off.  We 
should know within a few days.  Even with tepid UN/AU cover, 
there remain factors that could give the Chadians cold feet 
about CHD's transporting Darfurian rebels across Chad:  to 
wit, worries about Libya, Sudan, and Eritrea.  End Comment.) 
 
¶3.  (SBU) In a meeting with Ambassador Wall July 2, and 
subsequently in conversations with poloff, Murphy provided 
his read-out on alignments within the much-slintered SLM.  On 
July 3, JEM's representative in Ndjamena Tajaddin Niam and a 
former SLM heavyweight, Adam Bakhit, separately called on the 
Ambassador to say farewell, and added a few insights. 
 
CHD Analysis of SLM 
------------------- 
 
¶4.  (SBU) Murphy, who spent three weeks among the rebels in 
Darfur and is in constant telephonic contact with them, broke 
down the SLM rebels roughly into five groups.  Any 
categorization of SLM rebels was artificial, he said, because 
allegiances were fluid and leaders' power waxed or waned 
quickly.  There was a trend toward ethnic polarization, with 
the Zaghawans flocking to one side and other ethnicities 
defining themselves in opposition to the Zaghawans.  CHD's 
objective was to work from the field commanders "up" rather 
than from the external leaders "down," as the field 
commanders were closer to realities on the ground and were 
more amenable to compromise.  However, the effort in Um Rai 
(in rebel territory) to heal the SLM divisions, an effort 
that was entirely field-based, failed because, among other 
reasons, it did not adequately take the external leaders into 
consideration -- so CHD was not going to make that mistake. 
Murphy said he had started with Abd al-Wahid al-Nur's 
fighters in western Jabal Marra, got them on board, then got 
the rest of the fighters on board.  The hard part, ever 
since, had been the external leaders and waffling UN/AU 
leadership.  The fighters are ready to get on the plane. 
 
¶5.  (SBU) According to Murphy, by far the most important SLM 
group at present, in terms of fighting men on the ground, is 
the Zaghawan force in northern Darfur (sometimes known as 
SLM-Unity) commanded by Abdallah Yahya.  This group, Murphy 
said, is strong in the field but weak in political 
leadership.  Sharif Harir, a Zaghawan professor in Norway, 
had gravitated recently toward Abdallah Yahya and aspired to 
this political leadership but had proved to be a divisive 
figure at Um Rai.  (Murphy preferred that Sharif Harir not 
come to Mombasa.)  Another Zaghawan would-be leader, Adam Ali 
Shoggar, had now joined Abadallah Yahya in the field.  Murphy 
said that the true political leader of this group should be 
Sulayman Jammous, an older figure revered among Darfurians. 
However, Sulayman Jammous was confined by the UN in Kadugli, 
where he had been taken for medical treatment.  Meanwhile, 
Murphy said, Abdallah Yahya had traveled to Asmara and now 
been for some weeks in Tripoli, waiting for a check from 
Qadhafi (Abdallah Yahya had told Murphy by telephone that the 
Libyans were not holding him but that he was "waiting" -- 
which in the Qadhafi context, Murphy assumed, meant waiting 
for money).  Murphy worried that Abdallah Yahya was a 
political neophyte and, as the weeks lengthened in Asmara and 
Tripoli, he was losing touch with the field.  Meanwhile, 
Sharif Harir had been holding in Asmara. 
 
¶6.  (SBU) The Fur, Murphy said, were split in two directions 
 
NDJAMENA 00000564  002.2 OF 003 
 
 
by Fur external leaders Abd al-Wahid al-Nur (in Europe) and 
Ahmad Abd al-Shafi (in Kampala).  Abd al-Wahid had a more 
significant fighting force (western Jabal Marra) and greater 
popular following than Abd al-Shafi (small force southeast of 
Jabal Marra).  Abd al-Shafi was working with Fur elder 
statesman Ahmad Ibrahim Diraij in London to build a 
Darfur-wide following.  It seemed likely that Abd al-Wahid 
and Abd al-Shafi, now intense rivals, would not both show up 
in Mombasa.  A fourth grouping was led by Khamis Abdallah 
Abakar, a Masalit who had holed up in Ndjamena and boycotted 
Um Rai.  He has a small force on the Chadian border near 
Adre.  Khamis Abdallah had been in Asmara in recent weeks and 
was finding it difficult to get an exit visa (effectively 
held there against his will).  Finally, Murphy discerned a 
fifth grouping, which had a significant non-Zaghawan force in 
the northern area but not an announced leader.  The most 
significant personage in this group, "the unannounced 
leader," was Sulayman Marajan (from the Maidob).  A Zaghawan, 
Jar al-Nabi, was also noteworthy in this grouping. 
 
¶7.  (SBU) Murphy said that he had been in continual contact 
with non-SLM groups, including the JEM, NMRD, and Arab 
rebels.  CHD's inclination was not to invite them now to 
Mombasa, even as observers, but to "keep it organic," wait to 
see if the conference was moving in the right direction, and 
perhaps bring them in later.  He characterized the JEM as a 
significant player, with "some" fighters on the ground, near 
the Chadian border at Tine.  He saw the NMRD, which split off 
from JEM in 2004, as, effectively, a Chadian creation, 
operating only in Chad, with Chadian weapons; many of the 
NMRD fighters, he believed, had filtered back into Darfur to 
join Abdallah Yahya.  The Arab rebels, who now give 
themselves the name URFF (United Revolutionary Force Front), 
he believed to be a minor element.  The URFF and NMRD share 
an office in Ndjamena and claim to have an alliance with 
Khamis Abdallah. 
 
JEM Perspective 
--------------- 
 
¶8. (SBU) When JEM's Tajaddin Niam called on the Ambassador 
July 2 to bid farewell, he emphasized, as he had in his June 
20 meeting with the Ambassador (reftel), the importance of 
unifying SLM ranks and getting on with political resolution 
of the Darfur conflict.  JEM leader Khalil Ibrahim was "in 
the field" (Darfur) and JEM vice president Bahar Idriss Abu 
Garda and JEM "foreign minister" Ahmad Togoud were still in 
Tripoli.  Tajaddin said he was keeping a low profile in 
Ndjamena -- he believed Deby would not ask him to leave if he 
lay low.  He anticipated going to Mombasa with a small JEM 
team as observers.  He thought that success at the CHD 
conference would be difficult to achieve but that it was 
essential to try. 
 
¶9.  (SBU) Tajaddin saw Abd al-Shafi's cosying up to Diraij as 
the beginning of yet another wedge in the SLM.  Abd al-Wahid 
was in Paris shouting that he was the SLM leader, while 
Sharif Harir, "under civil detention in Asmara" (with Khamis 
Abdallah) was shouting the same.  "At least when you are in 
Tripoli you are free to leave."  Tajaddin saw the hand of 
Sudan in these SLM divisions.  Something that so directly 
served the Sudanese government's interests must be concocted 
by it.  The result, he said, was that the international 
community was now beginning to see the rebels as being as 
much a factor in the suffering of the Darfurian people as the 
government of Sudan was.  Eritrea had also played a nefarious 
role in dividing the SLM.  The trouble with the SLM was that, 
from the beginning, it had not had mature, experienced 
political leaders.  John Garang had organized the SLM on a 
tribal basis, in contrast to the JEM, which from the 
beginning had been based on institutions and not 
personalities and tribes.  The Ambassador pointed out that 
the top three personalities in the JEM were Zaghawan, as was 
Tajaddin, but Tajaddin claimed, in response, that most of 
JEM's officials below that level, and eight out of nine JEM 
heads of office in Europe, were not Zaghawan. 
 
Adam Bakhit 
----------- 
 
¶10.  (SBU) Adam Bakhit, a formerly important SLM commander 
who has milled around in Ndjamena for several months, also 
asked to pay farewell on the Ambassador July 2.  He said that 
he was chief of staff to Khamis Abdallah, who, he said, was 
now chairman of the recently-formed SNRF (Sudanese National 
Redemption Front, not to be confused with the defunct 
National Redemption Front, which had been formed in June 2006 
and had included JEM).  Bakhit said that five groups had 
joined their forces in the SNRF and had now moved across the 
border into Sudanese territory near Tine:  the SLM faction 
under Khamis Abdallah (Masalit), NMRD under Jibril Abd 
 
NDJAMENA 00000564  003.2 OF 003 
 
 
al-Karim (Zaghawan), URFF Arab group under its chairman 
al-Zubaydi (Ibrahim Ahmad Abdullah Ja'dallah, nicknamed 
al-Zubaydi) and chief of staff Yasin Yusuf Abd al-Rahman, a 
Kordofan group under Muhammad Bilayl, and a Kush group under 
Abd al-Majid Muhammad Durshab.  He said that Adam Ali Shoggar 
had now teamed up with Khamis Abdallah -- that, in fact, he 
had left Shoggar "at the border" before coming to Ndjamena to 
see the Ambassador.  He said he had just spoken to Abdallah 
Yahya in Tripoli and urged him not to sign any agreement 
there with Qadhafi protege Osman Bushra, a Darfur rebel who 
was always "playing Qadhafi's dirty games."  He insinuated 
that Sudan was in the process of "buying off" JEM's Khalil 
Ibrahim, pursuing a strategy of dividing the rebels which 
would only ensure that the war continued indefinitely.  He 
was highly critical of Sharif Harir, Ahmad Abd al-Shafi, and 
Abd al-Wahid al-Nur as each pursuing personal ambition at the 
expense of the Darfurian people. 
 
¶11.  (U) Tripoli minimize considered. 
WALL