UN visit arouses different reactions in Sudan
June 5, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — With the arrival of a UN Security Council delegation in Khartoum on Monday evening, the council’s visit has aroused different reactions in Kharrtoum.
The delegation, comprising permanent representative of all its 15 member states, is to hold meetings with Sudanese officials on Tuesday on the UN role to stabilize the situation in Sudan’s western region of Darfur and to help implement a peace agreement signed by the government and Darfur rebel movements last month.
According to an official arrangement, after talks with Sudanese President Omer al-Bashir, Vice President Ali Osman Mohammed Taha and other senior officials on Tuesday, a press conference is to be held in the evening.
On Thursday, the delegation is scheduled to pay a visit to Juba, capital of south Sudan, where its members are going to have talks with First Sudanese Vice President and President of the Government of the South Sudan Salva Kiir Mayardit as well as local senior officials.
The delegation will travel on Friday to Darfur, where they will meet in the al-Fashir city with Osman Mohammed Yousuf Kibr, Governor of the North Darfur state, and officials of the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS).
The Sudanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has expressed the government welcome to the UN delegation’s visit, saying that the visit was “generally positive”.
It stressed that “the Security Council does not have a certain agenda,” a diplomatic term which is usually used to describe a scheme or conspiracy of harming a country’s interests.
Meanwhile, Presidential Advisor Mustafa Osman Ismail hoped that the visit would enable the UN council to get acquainted with the situations on the ground by their own eyes and ears instead of depending on media or diplomatic reports.
“The visit will give the Security Council members the chance of getting acquainted with the general climate and the successive positive developments, which are taking place in the peace process in the country at both the levels of the north-south peace process and the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA),” said Ismail.
He noted that 18 resolutions have been adopted by the UN Security Council since Sudan’s present regime came to power in 1989, adding that the number of wars are far more than Security Council resolutions concerning other dangerous issues in the world.
The recent UN resolutions against Sudan were exaggerated and politically motivated by certain forces, especially the United States, he said.
During the past week, local mass media issued a number of articles analyzing the nature of the Security Council delegation’s visit and relating it with the council’s resolution 1679, which calls for a quick deployment of international peacekeepers in Darfur.
On May 16, the resolution 1679 was adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council, only one day after the African Union Peace and Security Council passed a resolution declaring “the need for concrete steps to effect the transition in Darfur from the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) to a UN operation”.
In a statement issued hours before its delegation’s arrival in Khartoum, the Security Council called for a transition of the peacekeeping mission in Darfur to the UN from the AU “as soon as possible”.
Fathi Khalil, Dean of the Sudanese Bar Association, warned that an intervention of the UN forces would change Darfur into a more serious threat for the international peace and security, adding that the intervention would be considered as occupation.
Mohammed Aud al-Barudi, an expert on international relations, has said that the Security Council would very probably endorse a resolution stipulating the UN peacekeepers deployment in Darfur no matter whether the government would agree.
Trying to placate the public opinion, the Sudanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the visit of the Security Council delegation had nothing to do with the resolution 1679, and the UN council did not have any intention to impose sanctions on Sudan.
The visit was decided before a long time in the framework of a travel program, which also includes other African countries, stressed the ministry.
(Xinhua/ST)