Senegal calls for Intl observers on Chad-Sudan border
Aug 4, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — Senegal’s president said Friday he would try to persuade his counterparts in Sudan and Chad to accept international observers along their common border to stem cross-border raids.
Chad and Sudan each accuse the other of backing the other’s rebels. They signed a peace deal late last month to stem violence along their common frontier, but tensions remain and Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade, on a peacemaking mission, said there had “recently been more attacks.”
He had no details. In June, Chad complained to the U.N. Security Council that Sudan was backing armed groups who were carrying out raids in eastern Chad, across the border from Darfur. Sudan had previously accused Chad of supporting Darfur rebels, who continue fighting in several areas despite a May 5 peace accord.
The conflict in Darfur, which borders Chad, has shaken the entire region.
Wade made the comments to a small group of reporters aboard his presidential jet before landing in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, where he was to hold talks with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. He travels Monday to N’Djamena for talks with Chadian President Idriss Deby.
Wade said France has offered to provide planes to help provide surveillance along the Chad-Sudan frontier, but any agreement on such a force appeared a long way off – and, crucially, short of funding. He said African Union or U.N. troops might support such an effort. Already, an A.U. force in Darfur is struggling with too few troops and too little money and equipment – including lack of air power.
“How can we stop incursions along the border? It’s not simple,” Wade said. “Not everybody is in agreement on how to monitor the border, but I think I can at least get the two sides to discuss it.”
Wade said he had been invited by both Deby and al-Bashir to work as a “facilitator” to help the two nations resolve their differences. Both Deby and al-Bashir are expected in Senegal’s seaside capital, Dakar, on Wednesday.
Wade is due to visit El-Fasher in North Darfur on Sunday before traveling Monday to N’Djamena, where he said he would attend Deby’s swearing-in ceremony Tuesday. Deby, who first seized power by force in 1990, won a May 3 vote the main Chadian opposition boycotted. Critics have said the elections, as well as those won by Deby in 1996 and 2001, were not free or fair.
In Darfur, Wade said he would try to get those groups who didn’t sign the latest Darfur peace accord to join the peace process.
Senegal has about 380 hundred troops in the A.U.’s 7,000-strong peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Khartoum has resisted calls from the A.U., U.N. and major Western powers for a bigger, more robust U.N. peacekeeping force to take over from the A.U. in Darfur.
The A.U. force has been accused of failing to protect civilians from rebels or militias, and Wade said the mission lacked the means. He said Senegal originally had 580 troops in Darfur but had to reduce that number because it could not support more.
“The African Union has realized that despite its goodwill, it doesn’t have the means,” Wade said.
Decades of low-level clashes in Sudan’s Darfur over land and water erupted into crisis in early 2003 when ethnic African rebel groups rose up against the Arab-led government, which responded by unleashing ethnic Arab militias known as janjaweed, who have been accused of atrocities. The Sudanese government denies backing the janjaweed but agreed under the May peace agreement with the largest rebel group to disarm and disband the janjaweed.
(AP/ST)