AU commission chairman heads to Cairo for Darfur talks with Arab League

ADDIS ABABA, Aug 8 (AFP) — African Union (AU) Commission Chairman, Alpha Oumar Konare on Sunday left for Cairo to discuss a planned deployment of peacekeepers in Sudan’s Darfur region where a conflict has spawned what United Nations has described as the world’s worst humanitarian disastar, officials said.

Konare will meet Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa on the sidelines of an emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers, convened to review developments in the region in light of a July 30 UN resolution on Darfur, in western Sudan.

The resolution calls on the Khartoum government to bring the situation in the region under control within 30 days or face international action.

Konare will brief Mussa “on the AU position and the preparations currently underway to deploy the African peacekeeping force and will discuss how the Arab League can support AU efforts,” AU spokesman Adam Thiam told AFP in Addis Ababa.

On August 4, the AU said it was planning to transform what was supposed to be a small 300-man unit to protect AU observers overseeing a shaky ceasefire in Darfur into a 2,000-strong peacekeeping force, which will have a broader mandate of ensuring that there is security.

Also Sunday, a team tasked by UN chief Kofi Annan to help the pan-African body set up a peacekeeping force for the Sudan’s resource-rich province, left Addis Ababa for Sudan for a tour that will take them to Darfur, UN officials said.

The team, including military experts, is scheduled to be in Darfur on Monday to assess the ground situation and then advise the AU before it deploys the force there.

Up to 50,000 people have died in the 17-month conflict in Darfur pitting government forces and their Arab militia allies against two main local rebel groups.

Around 1.2 million villagers people have been displaced in the crisis, with around 200,000 others already settled in sweltering camps in impoverished eastern Chad.