Arab League cooperating with AU to resolve Darfur crisis – Musa
Oct 20, 2006 (CAIRO) — Arab League (AL) Secretary-General Amr Moussa has said that the Cairo-based League has been in good cooperation with the African Union (AU) to solve the Darfur issue, rebuking attempts to portray the Darfur crisis as an Arab-African conflict.
“Since the very first moment of the Darfur crisis, the Arab League has chosen to coordinate its position with the AU,” Moussa said in a recent written interview with Xinhua.
Sudan, a Muslim-dominated nation with nearly 40 percent of its population Arabs, is located in north Africa and is a member stateof both the pan-Arab forum and the African Union.
In Sudan’s western region of Darfur, rebel groups took up arms against the government in early 2003, accusing Khartoum of marginalizing the region.
Moussa said that he sent a fact-finding mission to Darfur from April 29 to May 15, 2005, and later he himself visited Darfur in order to assess the situation.
The findings of the mission were discussed at an extraordinary Arab meeting, which was attended by the AU chairman, AU commissioner and the UN special representative for Sudan, Moussa said.
He said the two organizations have in the past few years been working together to solve difficult problems particularly in Sudanand Somalia and Arab-African relations are very profound.
But, there have been times and cases that some people have attempted to draw a dividing line between Arabs and Africans, Moussa said.
“This was particularly clear in the case of the conflict between political factions from southern Sudan and the Khartoum government,” he said, adding the unfortunate lack of development in southern Sudan was portrayed as an “Arab” discrimination against “African” South.
“We had a similar problem with the situation in Darfur where some people attempted to portray the human tragedy in this part ofSudan as an Arab-African conflict,” he said.
Of the AL’s 22 member states, 10 are located in north Africa –Algeria, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan and Tunisia.
Moussa also said the league has assured through words and actions that it will spare no effort to enhance cooperation with the African Union and other organizations to facilitate implementation of the Darfur Peace Agreement.
On May 5, the Sudanese government signed the agreement with a main faction of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement led by Minni Arkou Minawi in the Nigerian capital Abuja.
Sudan has been under the West’s mounting pressure to accept UN Security Council Resolution 1706 on deployment of international peacekeeping forces in Darfur to replace underfunded AU forces.
The AL and its member states have promised to provide financialaid to AU forces to underpin their mission in Darfur.
Last month, the AU Peace and Security Council decided to extendthe mandate of the 7,800-strong AU forces in Darfur to Dec. 31, calling on Arab countries and the international community to provide necessary help for the forces.
(Xinhua)