Sudan summit postponed as tensions with Chad rise
Jan 3, 2006 (LAGOS) — An African Union meeting to discuss Sudan’s violent Darfur region and its dispute with neighbouring Chad has been postponed as tensions rise over Chadian charges that Sudan is backing rebels, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday.
Wednesday’s meeting in Tripoli was to have focused on Darfur, a western Sudanese region the size of France where fighting between rebels and government forces and militias has raged since 2003.
It would also have received a report from an AU ad hoc committee on recent tensions between Chad and Sudan.
Chad’s President Idriss Deby accuses Sudan of backing Chadian rebels operating on the countries’ common border who have vowed to overthrow him. Deby has also demanded this month’s African Union summit in Sudan’s capital Khartoum be relocated.
Sudan has denied helping the Chadian insurgents.
Although invited to the Tripoli talks, Deby had already publicly shunned them because he has convened a meeting on Wednesday in his own capital N’Djamena of the six-nation Central African monetary bloc CEMAC.
Libya’s official news agency quoted the country’s deputy foreign minister on Tuesday as saying the Tripoli meeting would go ahead, but a spokeswoman for the AU chairman, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, said it was off.
“The (Tripoli) summit … has been postponed,” she said.
“The summit was to discuss solutions to end the crisis in Darfur in Sudan and to consider the report of the ad hoc AU committee on the differences between Chad and Sudan,” she added.
She declined to give further details.
“MERCENARIES”
The dispute flared after a rebel attack on the Chadian border town of Adre on Dec. 18.
Chad’s government said its forces repelled the attack and inflicted heavy casualties on rebel forces, who in turn claimed they had made a tactical withdrawal and planned another assault.
Chadian rebel groups, including one formed by Chadian army deserters and another which claimed to have carried out the Dec. 18 attack, said last week they had formed a military alliance to unseat Deby.
His government dismissed the new rebel alliance as a front for the Sudanese government.
A Chadian statement on Monday said Sudanese government officials had visited the town of el-Geneina on Sudan’s side of the border in recent days “to create the so-called alliance of political and military movements which is in reality just a group of mercenaries in the pay of the Khartoum government”.
Analysts say Deby, who seized power in a 1990 coup, faces twin threats from rivals at home competing to succeed him and from spillover from Darfur, where fighting since 2003 has killed tens of thousands of people and forced more than 2 million from their homes.
In November, unidentified gunmen raided army bases in Chad’s capital N’Djamena in what the government said looked like part of a wider insurgency bid, two months after scores of soldiers deserted.