Sudan hopes to head AU but prospects uncertain
Jan 14, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — Sudan said on Saturday it believed it was entitled to take the chair of the African Union after a summit it is hosting this month, but acknowledged its prospects were unclear.
Rights groups question how Sudan can act as Africa’s ambassador when it is in the international firing line over its military campaign in the Darfur region — a conflict that has caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and prompted U.S. accusations of genocide.
Sudan, which denies these charges, insisted it had a legitimate claim to take the chairmanship after the summit, which begins in Khartoum on January 23.
“We have the right, we are confident. We want it but we are not actively campaigning for it,” said Foreign Minister Lam Akol. “It is not necessarily cast in iron that we will get the chairmanship but we are aspiring for it,” he told reporters.
The host of an AU summit usually takes over the chairmanship, but the rules are unclear.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi did not take over at the last summit, held in Libya last July, so that Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has led the organization for two years.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST?
With 7,000 AU troops monitoring a tentative truce in Darfur and AU-mediated peace talks progressing, albeit slowly, many including Darfur’s rebels say there would be a conflict of interest if Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir became AU chairman.
“With the problem in Darfur it obviously makes it very problematic,” U.S. assistant secretary of state for Africa Jendayi Frazer said in Washington on Friday.
Jan Pronk, the UN special envoy for Sudan, told a news conference in New York on Friday that he had heard no decision would be made at the summit, and that Obasanjo would stay on.
Tanzania’s UN ambassador, Augustine Mahega, said consultations on the chairmanship were going on that would take into account the “difficulties” of Sudan taking over.
Non-Arab rebels took up arms in Darfur in early 2003 saying the central government was neglecting the vast region.
The United Nations says Khartoum responded by arming Arab miltias, who have been accused of conducting a widespread campaign of rape, looting and killing with impunity.
Tens of thousands have been killed and more than 2 million driven from their homes in a spiral of violence slowed only by one of the world’s largest humanitarian operations.
Darfur’s rebels have said they will not continue with peace talks in the Nigerian capital Abuja if Bashir takes over the chair of the AU, because the AU would lose its impartiality.
But Sudan rejected this. “Obasanjo is going to continue the mediation of the Darfur conflict whether he is head of the AU or not,” senior foreign ministry official Mutrif Siddig said. “President Bashir is not going to take over the mediation.”
The 53-nation African Union was originally set up in 1963 as the Organization of African Unity to promote political and economic cooperation between newly independent African states.
(Reuters)