French FM seeks to boost France’s role in solving Darfur crisis
June 11, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — In a bid to boost diplomatic efforts over Darfur, France’s new foreign minister pressed Sudan’s president on Monday to commit to a joint U.N. and African mission in the war-torn region, hoping his clout as a former humanitarian activist would help ease the regime’s standoff with the West.
Bernard Kouchner said his talks with President Omar al-Bashir and other top Sudanese officials, including a former Darfur rebel leader, had helped «lift a certain number of complications» with the Sudanese.
A relative latecomer among Western nations trying to pressure Khartoum into ending what the White House has labeled a “genocide,” France’s newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to make Darfur a top priority. He tasked Kouchner, a co-founder of the international aid group Doctors Without Borders, with jump-starting peace efforts.
France also plans to host an international conference later this month with European countries and envoys from Egypt, the U.S. and China to help revive the Darfur peace process, where a one-year old deal has shown little sign of success.
More than 200,000 people have died in Darfur and 2.5 million other have been chased from their homes since 2003, when local rebels took up arms against the Sudanese government, accusing it of decades of neglect. Khartoum contests these figures but refuses to cooperate with the International Criminal Court, which recently issued arrest warrants against a Sudanese cabinet minister and a paramilitary chief for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Sudan also had resisted for months a United Nations resolution for 22,000 U.N. peacekeepers to replace a beleaguered African Union force currently in Darfur. But Khartoum recently showed signs that it is edging toward a compromise deal for a “hybrid operation” of AU and U.N. troops.
Kouchner invited Sudan’s Foreign Minister Lam Akol to attend the French conference, but Akol said after their meeting Monday he would not come for «a number of reasons.
Several of Sudan’s neighbors, meanwhile, are pressing Darfur rebel groups to join new negotiations with the government. Akol said Khartoum wanted all negotiations to be «streamlined» to the joint team of U.N. and AU envoys for Darfur. As part of that streamlining, he said Sudanese envoys met in Ethiopia on Monday with the U.N. and AU.
“We hope they will agree on all details,” Akol said, calling on the U.N. Security Council to then vote for a new deployment resolution to help «African countries send extra troops … so that the situation in Darfur can be brought back to normal as soon as possible.
Kouchner said after meeting with al-Bashir that the Sudanese leader remained adamant that only African soldiers should contribute to the new force, with the U.N. serving as a logistical backer.
But “Darfur cannot be only an African problem,” Kouchner said. «At a certain level, the respect for human rights concerns the whole world.
“I respect Sudan’s sovereignty,” Kouchner said told reporters late Sunday. «But to be respected, a (state’s) sovereignty has to be respectable.
Asked whether France could send troops to Darfur, he answered «Why not?» but would not be more specific. However, he said France would soon be sending technical advisers to the AU mission.
France has 1,000 troops stationed in Chad and is eager to limit the fallout from the crisis into Sudan’s western neighbor, a former French colony where some 250,000 Darfur refugees now live in camps along with 150,000 Chadians caught in the violence.
The minister’s stop in Khartoum came at the end of a five-day African trip that also brought him to Chad, where Kouchner said the president had agreed to form a group to discuss a possible international force along Darfur’s border.
Kouchner said during their one-hour meeting behind closed doors, al-Bashir “had raised the problem” of Sudan’s embattled relations with the U.S., which recently beefed up unilateral sanctions against the regime.
Kouchner said he wasn’t convinced that sanctions were useful, but the Sudanese «seem clearly affected by this issue, considering how much they raised it.
The French minister’s talks with al-Bashir appeared unusually cordial, and the two men embraced and joked in front of the cameras at the start of their meeting.
“We are very glad to greet you officially in Sudan now,” al-Bashir told Kouchner, stating that their relationship went «back a long way.
As a humanitarian worker, Kouchner often operated clandestinely in southern Sudan during a separate civil war there, building ties with several former southern rebels who now hold government positions in Khartoum.
“I was supporting the unity of Sudan at the time, and I still do,” Kouchner explained.
However, the French minister said the talks with al-Bashir had “not been easy.”
“My purpose was to remind al-Bashir of his obligations” under the international treaties Sudan has signed, Kouchner said. “I also wanted him to understand, without hostility, the true nature of the emotion around the world regarding Darfur.
(AP)