Minnawi (L) and JEM leader Ibrahim Khalil during the talks. (Reuters)

ABUJA, May 5, 2006 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Peace in Sudan's troubled region of Darfur looked increasingly at stake on Friday, May 5, after two main rebel groups rejected to sign an amended peace deal with Sudan despite the initial agreement of the biggest faction Sudan Liberation Army (SLA).

"I have heard of it but we are not part of it. That has not changed our position," spokesman for the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) Mohammed Tugod told Agence France-Presse (AFP)

A SLA's sub-group also refused to sign Friday.

"We need the document to be improved upon. We are not going to sign it," one of its leaders, Abdelwahid Al-Nur, said.

Earlier on Friday SLA leader Minni Minnawi agreed "in principle" to sign the deal mediated by the African Union despite some reservations.

"Mr Minni Minnawi, of the Sudan Liberation Army faction, has accepted to sign the peace agreement although he expressed some reservations on power sharing," AU spokesman Nouredine Mezni told AFP.

A spokesman for the SLA, which has split into two factions, confirmed the development.

"The last decision we took is that we accept the AU proposal with the new changes but we need to sit with other SLA (faction) and JEM and discuss with them," Self Eldin Haruon said.

Tugod earlier said that thee draft peace accord failed to answer his group's demands for Darfur's three states to be united into a single autonomous region.

As drawn up by the AU, the proposed peace plan would call for a referendum in Darfur to decide whether to create a single administrative region, but only after fighting has halted and national elections have been held.

The SLA and JEM at peace talks in Abuja, Nigeria, defied Thursday, May 4, the third in a series of 48-hour deadlines and rejected a proposed deal with the Khartoum government to end their war.

Darfur, an arid desert region of western Sudan the size of France or Texas, erupted into civil war in early 2003 when armed local movements rebelled against the central government to demand autonomy from Khartoum.

The war has caused at least 180,000 deaths and left 2.4 million people homeless.

"It's time for the leadership of the (rebel) movements to step forward and to help their people," said Zoellick.

An AU official said Friday that the Sudanese government has accepted the amended version of the peace agreement, Reuters reported.

The Western diplomats fine-tuned the draft accord, pushing the government to offer better guarantees that it would disarm the Arab Janjaweed militias and recruit former rebels into the national armed forces.

This week senior international envoys, including US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, came to Abuja to strongarm the warring parties into a peace deal which would allow humanitarian aid to flow and elections to be held.

"It's time for the leadership of the (rebel) movements to step forward and to help their people," Zoellick told reporters Thursday.

Separately, the Austrian presidency of the European Union appealed to the rebels to agree to the deal, which has already been accepted by the Sudanese government, saying failure to strike an accord would be "irresponsible."

UN humanitarian relief coordinator Jan Egeland also warned that a huge aid operation in the devastated western region of Sudan could be jeopardized.

The US is leading a western drive to replace 7,000 African Union troops in Darfur with UN peacekeepers, a matter slammed by Khartoum as a pretext to internationalize the problem.

Sudan has said it will accept UN peacekeepers only if there is a deal in Abuja. If the talks fail, political analysts caution there will be even fewer options over how to handle Darfur.

Darfur has also become a major rallying cry inside the United States over the past few months with Hollywood icons like George Clooney using their star power to focus attention on the region, where Clooney said the first genocide of this century was taking place.