Sudan point man for Darfur dies in car accident
June 27, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — A top Sudanese presidential adviser who played a key role in Darfur peace negotiations died early Wednesday in a car accident, a government official said.
Majzoub al-Khalifa was driving on a road from his home village to the capital with his brother Khawadh al-Khalifa when their car flipped over in a road accident at dawn on Wednesday, Sudan’s presidential spokesman Majzoub Faidul told The Associated Press.
The two brothers died of their injuries near the northern Sudan town of Shendi some 180 kilometers (112 miles) north of Khartoum, the capital, he said.
Sudanese television interrupted its usual programs shortly after and ran recitations of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, in sign of mourning.
Al-Khalifa was one of the most senior aides to Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir. They hailed from the same dominant Arab tribe, the Jaaly, and al-Khalifa was a top member of the ruling National Congress Party.
He negotiated and signed on behalf of Sudan the May 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement meant to end bloodshed in the remote western Sudanese region where over 200,000 people have been killed and 2,5 million made refugee since a local rebellion erupted four years ago.
Al-Bashir “mourns … a leading Sudanese figure and a symbol of national and Islamic action: the late Doctor Majzoub al-Khalifa,” the official news agency, SUNA, quoted a presidential statement as saying.
Faidul said the president would attend his advisor’s funeral in his home village of Taibat al-Khawad.
Born in 1952, al-Khalifa was 55 or 54 years old. A medical doctor by training, he was a senior figure in the Islamist movement that planned the bloodless military coup that brought al-Bashir to power in 1989. Al-Khalifa became agriculture minister, and then held the influential position of governor of the state of Khartoum.
Considered a relative hard-liner in the NCP party, he reportedly held strong sway on government affairs through his informal position as presidential adviser, and was considered the Sudanese point man for all matters related to Darfur.
Since being named presidential adviser in August 2005, al-Khalifa spearheaded Sudanese efforts to solve the crisis, signing the 2006 peace deal in Abuja, Nigeria, with one Darfur rebel group and negotiating with other factions since.
The United Nations mission in Sudan expressed its “heartfelt condolences” to al-Khalifa’s family and the Sudanese government.
Al-Khalifa “will be remembered as a tenacious negotiator and a high caliber statesman, and for his contribution to the peaceful resolution of the Darfur conflict through the Abuja peace process,” the U.N. said in a statement.
The presidential adviser’s office had been a regular stop for foreign delegations visiting the Sudanese capital to press Khartoum into accepting a U.N. intervention in Darfur.
Al-Bashir resisted any U.N. presence for months, but then finally agreed this month to a hybrid force of U.N. and African union troops in the region.
Al-Khalifa was deemed instrumental in that deal, as well as in efforts to bring together splinter Darfur rebel groups for a new round of peace talks that diplomats say could begin in August.
(AP)