JANJAWEED MILITIA

Rebel groups took up arms in early 2003, accusing the central government of neglect. The conflict took on political and racial overtones with the Arab-dominated Khartoum government accused of arming militia, known as Janjaweed, accused of rape, killings and burning down villages.

Council members also were immediately confronted with what they did not want to hear in a welcoming session with the Wali or governor of North Darfur, Osman Kibir. He told the group Darfur needed humanitarian aid but "not troops."

In response, Jones Parry noted that the Janjaweed should be disarmed by the government, as it promised. "That action is way overdue," he said.

Sudan President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir told the council in Khartoum on Tuesday he would allow a U.N. military planning mission into Darfur for a possible transfer to a U.N. force from the African Union, now in Darfur. But Al-Bashir refused to give a green light to any robust force needed to stop the violence.

The government's resistance to U.N. peacekeepers was echoed by Mowad Jalaladin, a member of the Barty tribe he said has 250,000 members. He said a U.N. force in Darfur was tantamount to "foreign occupation and intervention."

"We are declaring a jihad against them," he told a group of reporters.

He said the Security Council should not become "an instrument of the ugly undertakings of the United States of America" and that the "root causes of the Darfur conflict are the doing of the Jewish organizations who financed this armed rebellion."