Chad, Sudan should seek peace — Deby, Gaddafi
Nov 8, 2006 (TRIPOLI) — Chad and neighbouring Sudan should repair ties by sticking to an accord to stop harming each other, the leaders of Chad and Libya agreed at a meeting in Libya, the official Jana news agency reported on Wednesday.
Chadian President Idriss Deby is in the north African country to meet Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi to discuss ways of improving Chad’s troubled relations with Sudan. Gaddafi has warm ties with both Deby and Sudanese leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
Despite a series of public peace accords between N’Djamena and Khartoum, Chad accuses Sudan of sending Janjaweed militia across the frontier and of arming and directing rebels seeking to overthrow President Deby.
Sudan’s government denies this.
Sudan and Chad long accused each other of backing rebel groups operating on either side of the border.
Jana said the matter was raised at talks on Tuesday between Deby and Gaddafi.
“At the meeting, it was underlined that abiding by the mechanism of executing the Tripoli Accord should be continued in order to contain the tension between Chad and Sudan,” Jana said.
Chad and Sudan agreed at a summit in Tripoli in February to stop insurgents setting up bases on their territories and end propaganda against one another.
The Chad-Sudan border has been beset by violence linked to the conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur region, where Arab militias known locally as Janjaweed are blamed for a campaign of rape, murder and pillage that Washington calls genocide.
Khartoum denies genocide and any link to the Janjaweed and is resisting international pressure to allow the United Nations to take over a struggling African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur.
Jana said Deby and Gaddafi supported the continuation of efforts by a so-called African Wise Men Commission to tackle the Darfur situation and its international aspects.
It did not elaborate. Jana was apparently referring to a plan by three African heads of state — Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade, Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo and Omar Bongo of Gabon — to try to persuade Sudan to accept the deployment of a U.N.-led peacekeeping force in Darfur.
(Reuters)