Chad FM minister due in Sudan to discuss border clash

April 14, 2007 (N’DJAMENA) — Chad’s foreign minister was due to fly to neighbouring Sudan on Saturday with a message for its president to help find a peaceful resolution to a dispute over a border clash, a Chadian official said.

“The Minister for External Relations Ahmat Allam-Mi will be in Khartoum today, Saturday, to meet the Sudanese authorities. This visit demonstrates Chad’s wish to resolve by peaceful means all the differences over which the two countries are opposed,” a Foreign Ministry press attache said.

“The minister is bearing a message from President Idriss Deby Itno to his Sudanese counterpart, Omar Hassan al-Bashir,” he said, but did not elaborate.

Sudan has said 17 of its soldiers were killed on Monday in a clash with Chadian troops who crossed the border into Sudanese territory.

Chad denied any deliberate attack on Sudan, but said its army forces clashed with Sudanese soldiers after crossing the border in pursuit of Sudanese-backed rebels it accuses of launching attacks across the border in Chad.

The incident triggered the latest in a series of disputes between Chad and Sudan since violence from a four-year-old conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur province spilled over the border into eastern Chad.

Libya, to the north, has intervened on a regular basis to lower tensions between the two oil-producing neighbours, who are both engaged in negotiations with the United Nations over plans to deploy peacekeepers in Darfur and eastern Chad.

Libya said this week it and Eritrea had deployed military and security observers on the Chad-Sudan border.

The No. 2 U.S. State Department official, John Negroponte, is currently in Sudan and is due to visit Chad.

(Reuters)