AU to hold emergency meeting on Darfur

Oct 10, 2005 (ADDIS ABABA) — The African Union’s Peace and Security Council is to meet urgently Monday to discuss its mission in Darfur after killings and kidnappings of AU peacekeepers in the troubled western Sudanese region, an official said.

“The council has been convened urgently … because of the extremely alarming degradation of the situation on the ground in Darfur and that fact that AU troops are being targetted,” said Adam Thiam, a spokesman for AU chief Alpha Oumar Konare.

“It will be a question of asking the council member states to condemn these acts and find a means of putting an end to them,” he told AFP, adding that the meeting was set to begin at 4:00 p.m. (1300 GMT).

He spoke amid outrage over recent developments in Darfur where rebels killed two Nigerian AU troops and two contractors on Saturday and kidnapped 38 other peacekeepers on Sunday.

Earlier Monday, an AU spokesman in Khartoum said all but two of 38 taken hostage had been released by a dissident faction of Darfur’s Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) which had also seized several of the pan-African body’s vehicles.

Saturday’s deaths were the first AU fatalities in the conflict-torn Sudanese region where it has some 6,300 troops monitoring a fragile ceasefire between black African rebels and government-backed Arab militias.

The African Union is looking to increase its contingent, which groups nationals from Rwanda, Nigeria, Senegal South African and Gambia, to 7,700.

An estimated 180,000 to 300,000 people have died in Darfur since the civil conflict erupted in February 2003, with some 2.6 million civilians left homeless.

The latest killings occurred as the warring parties entered a new round of peace talks in the Nigerian capital of Abuja on September 15.

The security situation in Darfur sharply worsened last month after rebels seized two government-held towns and Arab militias loyal to Khartoum raided camps for displaced persons in the region.

(AFP/ST)