Sudan’s Bashir to attend UN Darfur meeting

Sept 17, 2006 (HAVANA) — Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir will attend a United Nations meeting on Darfur, opening the way for further talks despite his rejection of U.N. peacekeeping troops, South Africa said on Sunday.

Bashir would “interact” with the U.N. Security Council over the issue and attend a summit of the African Union’s peace and security council, said South African President Thabo Mbeki after talks with Bashir and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

“President Bashir wasn’t going to go to New York but we discussed matters with him and he agreed that he would go to New York so that he can participate in that meeting,” Mbeki told reporters.

Bashir repeated his rejection of a U.N. force for Darfur at a summit of non-aligned nations in Havana on Saturday. He was concerned that a peace deal on Darfur signed in Nigeria on May 5 had not been implemented, Mbeki said.

Western leaders, some African presidents and humanitarian groups are piling pressure on Bashir to accept a U.N. resolution to deploy more than 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers to replace 7,000 African Union troops whose mandate expires on Sept. 30.

“There should be a U.N. deployment in Darfur but of course we would want to discuss that with President Bashir so that we can better understand the concerns,” Mbeki said.

The western region of Sudan bordering Chad has been plagued by political and ethnic violence since 2003 when rebels took up arms against the government and 200,000 people have been killed there, according to a new estimate.

Mbeki said the Non-Aligned Movement could be an important instrument in creating a multipolar world and, in a thinly veiled reference to Washington, said there was “a global imbalance of power.”

“Such is the imbalance that you then get results like the practice of unilateral action without respect for the United Nations,” he said ahead of a U.N. general assembly meeting next week.

Summit resolutions, which included a declaration of support for Iran’s right to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, were motivated by “a concern that the exercise of power globally has become too concentrated in a few hands,” Mbeki said.

(Reuters)