AU to extend Darfur force till end of year
Sept 20, 2006 (UNITED NATIONS) — The African Union’s peace and security council is expected to extend the mandate of its underfinanced force in Darfur on Wednesday until the end of the year, diplomats said.
The group, which is holding a mini-summit on the fringes of the U.N. General Assembly session, also convinced Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to allow reinforcements to the AU contingent of 7,000 troops and monitors.
But the envoys were not immediately certain what shape this would take. Bashir previously objected to the African Union force being absorbed into a United Nations peacekeeping operation and for any non-African troops to join the force.
The U.N. Security Council last month authorized a force of 22,500 soldiers and police officers under United Nations command to take over the Darfur operations from the underfinanced and poorly equipped AU troops.
More than 200,000 people have died in Darfur from the conflict or disease and 2.5 million have been forced from their homes into squalid camps in a campaign the United Nations calls the worst human crisis and the Bush administration labels as genocide. But unless Sudan consents, U.N. officials say troop contributing nations would not send in their soldiers.
British U.N. Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, who spoke to participants in the ongoing meeting, told reporters that Bashir was strongly criticized by other African leaders. “Apparently they gave him quite a pasting,” he said.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan as well as Undersecretary-General Jean-Marie Guehenno, the head of peacekeeping, spoke to the committee.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Bashir adamantly rejected a U.N. force but said Khartoum would approve an extension of the African Union force, whose mandate expires at the end of this month.
He also said the Security Council’s resolution authorizing a U.N. force was similar to terms underlying the U.S.-led operation in Iraq and was aimed at protecting Israel.
“It is very clear there is a plan to redraw the region,” he told reporters. “Any state in the region should be weakened, dismembered in order to protect the Israelis, to guarantee the Israeli security.”
(Reuters)