UN extends South Sudan peacekeeping mission
Sept 22, 2006 (UNITED NATIONS) — The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Friday to extend the mandate of U.N. peacekeepers monitoring a peace deal that ended a 21-year civil war in southern Sudan.
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the council decided on a two-week extension, with the intention of extending it further after that expires, after the African Union Peace and Security Council agreed Wednesday to keep its 7,000-strong force in conflict-wracked Darfur in western Sudan through the end of the year.
The A.U.’s decision averted a showdown over Sudan’s refusal to permit the United Nations to take over the mission in Darfur and triple its size.
Bolton said the extension until Oct. 8 would give the council time to consider a variety of steps that might be taken, including U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s proposal for a heads-of-state meeting on Sudan.
The short renewal of the mandate, which is set to expire on Sept. 24, also would provide additional time “to build up momentum and pressure on the government in Khartoum to accept the inevitability that there’s going to be a U.N. peacekeeping force,” Bolton said.
Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir has refused to allow U.N. peacekeepers to take over from the overstretched and ill-equipped AU force, despite intense pressure from many countries in Africa and around the world. He maintains a U.N. force in Darfur would violate Sudan’s sovereignty and be part of a Western conspiracy to break up Sudan.
U.K. Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said the African Union’s decision had “averted a security vacuum.” But she warned that the war-torn Sudanese province remains in crisis.
“It can only be a temporary reprieve,” Beckett said Friday in her speech to the U.N. General Assembly. “We also need action immediately on the political and humanitarian front.”
She also stressed that the stability of Sudan rested ultimately with al-Bashir, saying: “It is, above all, his responsibility.”
The U.N. already has more than 11,000 U.N. peacekeepers in southern Sudan monitoring a January 2005 peace agreement between the country’s mostly Muslim north and the Christian and animist south, in which some 2 million people died. The Sudanese government has welcomed this force.
(AP/ST)