Kenya’s Kibaki urges world to back Sudan, Somali peace
April 28, 2006 (NAIROBI) — Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki on Friday urged the international community to help the conflict-torn east African nations of Sudan and Somalia to implement peace deals in order to restore stability in a region that has been blighted by conflict for decades.
He made the appeal during a state banquet for visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao, who is on the last leg of his round-the-world trip.
Kibaki said the world’s support was essential to help Sudan implement a peace deal signed in January 2005 that helped end a 21-year-conflict between Khartoum and the ex-rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) that killed 1.5 million people and displaced four million others.
International backing was also vital for Somali’s transitional government, which has failed to exert control over the warlords-infested country, added Kibaki who chairs the regional seven-nation Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), which mediated peace for both conflicts.
“With regard to Sudan, considerable progress has been made in implementing the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. We, however, call for continued efforts and support from the international community with the objective of giving impetus to the peace process in the Sudan,” Kibaki said.
“The transitional federal government of Somalia continues to require sustainable international assistance and support to enable it to carry out its mandate of post conflict reconstruction,” he added.
“In the search for durable peace in the region, IGAD member states have urged the United Nations to lift the arms embargo on Somalia,” Kibaki told Hu, whose veto-wielding nation has in the past joined other UN Security Council members to reject calls to lift the 14-year arms embargo.
“Likewise, we have emphasized the importance of implementation of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programmes,” Kibaki said, referring to an IGAD initiative to rid arms from Somalia that has met fierce opposition from warlords.
Last week, IGAD mediators who brokered the Somali and Sudan peace deals warned that the accords risked unravelling if the international community ignores the plight of the two African states.
Kenya has suffered the brunt of instability in the region, notably the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees as well as illegal arms.
The war in Sudan erupted in 1983 when the largely Christian and animist rebels took up arms to end years of marginalisation and oppression by successive Islamic governments in Khartoum.
Analysts say the achievements of the January 2005 peace deal spurred a more deadly conflict in Sudan’s western darfur region, where around 300,000 people have been killed and two million others displaced since February 2003, according to humanitarian groups.
In Somalia, the violent ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 plunged the country into a patchwork of fiefdoms governed by warlords, who have defied more than 14 rounds of peace talks to restore a semblance of national administration there.
(ST)