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September 7, 2007 (N’DJAMENA, ) — Chad will host a preparatory rebel meeting before the start of new Darfur peace talks in Libya at the end of October, in a bid to show support to the joint African Union and United Nations efforts to end the four year conflict in western Sudan.
President Idriss Deby, speaking to reporters after his talks with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said he had discussed hosting a preliminary meeting for Darfur rebels to to smooth out obstacles and difficulties prior to the 27 October talks in Tripoli.
The failure of Darfur’s fractured rebel movements to act in concert has stymied previous efforts to end the four-year war in Sudan’s Darfur.
“We have a long experience dealing with the Sudanese rebels, we know them personally,” Chad’s Foreign Affairs Minister Ahmat Allam-mi told reporters.
Ban said he expected the proposed rebel meeting in Chad to happen, and was “grateful for the kind offer and flexibility of President Deby to host such a preparatory meeting before we will be able to have formal political negotiations.”
“Chad is one of the important regional players in addressing (the) situation in Darfur,” Ban had said before going into his meeting with Deby.
Ban on Friday said, “Libya has been playing quite a constructive role” in bringing the splintered rebel groups together and was chosen for the venue after extensive U.N.-AU consultations with all the key parties.
The new negotiations follow a U.N. and AU conference in Arusha, Tanzania, in early August that brought Darfur rebels together to agree on a common platform for talks on issues such as power- and wealth-sharing, security, land and humanitarian issues. Many rebel leaders came, but there was one important holdout Abdelwahid Nur, who now says he also won’t go to Libya for talks.
“If he feels any political responsibility for the future of Sudan, he should participate,” Ban said of Nur on Friday. “That’s the leadership role.”
Another main rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, was quick to support the new talks.
The last round of Darfur peace talks in Abuja, Nigeria led to the Darfur Peace Agreement, which was signed in May 2006 by only one of Darfur’s several splintered rebel factions, and rejected by the Nur faction and by Justice and Equality.
EUROPEAN TROOPS
The fighting in Sudan has sent tens of thousands of refugees into Chad and neighboring Central African Republic. In addition, raiders from Sudan have attacked refugees and Chadian villagers in Chad, and Chadian rebels have taken advantage of the instability to use the Chad region bordering Darfur as a staging ground for their own war on Deby’s government.
“We talk about a spillover of the Darfur crisis into Chad. It’s not just a spillover,” said Kingsley Amaning, the U.N. humanitarian chief in Chad. “Instability from Darfur provided a haven for all sorts of armed groups.”
A yearlong, 3,000-strong U.N.-mandated European Union mission has been proposed to protect Sudanese refugees and other civilians in the affected parts of Chad and Central African Republic. France is expected to contribute most of the soldiers for the mission, Belgium has pledged 80-100 personnel, and others including Sweden and Britain have backed the mission but have yet to say if they will send troops.
The force planned for Chad and Central African Republic is in addition to 26,000 African Union-U.N. peacekeepers for Darfur.
Chad’s Deby rejected an initial proposal for a 10,900-member U.N. force to patrol the Darfur-Chad border and help protect about 238,000 Sudanese refugees in a dozen camps in eastern Chad and 180,000 Chadians uprooted by the fighting, a huge increase from 50,000 internally displaced Chadians just a year ago.
In a communique issued jointly with the U.N. late Friday, Chad committed itself to work with the U.N. and EU “to facilitate the rapid deployment of an international presence in eastern Chad and northeastern Central African Republic.”
Chad also committed itself in the communique to working to resolve both its own political crisis and to improving relations with Sudan. The governments of Chad and Sudan trade accusations that each is supporting the other’s rebels each side denies the charges.