SLA rebels threatened to take up arms again against Khartoum.

KHARTOUM — Former Darfur rebels said on Saturday, August 5, they have stopped implementing a peace deal until the government honors a promise to make Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) leader Minni Arcua Minnawi a special presidential assistant.

"The government is not serious about this peace and Minni will not come to Khartoum until this decree is issued from the presidency appointing him as assistant to the president," said Al-Fadil al-Tijani, the SLA deputy head of political affairs, Reuters reported.

"All technical committees have stopped work," he said.

Minnawi was supposed to arrive Khartoum on Saturday, but refused to show up.

An SLA official told reporters waiting at the airport that the rebel leader would not come until he was appointed.

SLA spokesman Mahjoub Hussein accused the government and the ruling party of "insincerity" and demanded the replacement of their chief negotiator Majzoub al-Khalifa Ahmed.

"We are going to notify the African Union, the United States and other countries and partners of the Abuja agreement that the situation is dangerous and the agreement is at risk and is facing the danger of collapsing," he told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"Our options are open and the revolution (rebellion) is continuing."

The SLA was the only one out of three rebel groups to have signed the peace deal.

The May peace agreement, which was struck after high-level intervention by both London and Washington, was intended to bring an end to the more than three-year-old conflict in Darfur in which some 300,000 people have died and 2.4 million more fled their homes.

UN Force

As SLA spokesman Mahjoub Hussein told the crowd in Khartoum why Minnawi was not coming, the only cheer he got was from his declaration of complete support for the immediate deployment of UN troops to Darfur, which Khartoum staunchly opposes.

"We welcome the ...immediate deployment of international troops to Darfur," he said.

The crowd burst into spontaneous applause. The ruling party of President Omar Al-Bashir, the National Congress Party, dominates parliament and government and compares a UN takeover of a struggling African Union mission in Darfur to a Western attempt to colonize Sudan.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Tuesday, August 1, a UN-led force for Darfur would need up to 18,600 troops and intense international pressure has to be put on Sudan to accept the intervention.

Annan said in a report to the UN Security Council that the new force should take over from the current African Union peacekeepers as soon as possible, adding more troops from mainly African and Asian countries.