Sudan wants public apology form Britain over sanctions threat
October 31, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — The Sudanese president, Omer Hassan al-Bashir, has accused British Prime Minister Gordon Brown of deliberately undermining the Darfur peace talks and demanded a public apology, after the prime minister threatened new sanctions against Sudan if the talks failed.
“Brown’s remarks amounted to direct encouragement for Darfur’s rebels to continue fighting and to boycott the negotiations that started in Libya at the weekend.” Al-Bashir told London based the Guardian in an exclusive interview in the presidential residence.
“We read it as encouraging these people, the movements, ‘Make these talks fail so that we will be able to punish the government of Sudan’,” he said.
Main Darfur rebel groups boycott the AU-UN mediated peace talks in Sirte, Libya requesting more time for unity talks and criticised the mismanagement of the joint mediation. The mediators plan to meet the recalcitrant rebel leaders in order to persuade them to participate in the negotiations.
FAILURE OF BRITAIN, FRANCE AND THE USA
Al- Bashir made it clear where he thought blame for failure would lie. “It will be the responsibility of the external interventions, particularly from Britain, France and the United States,” he said.
His anger was prompted by comments that Brown made to reporters in Britain on Sunday, the day after the peace talks started in Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s home town of Sirte. The Libyan leader is hosting the talks but has no role as a mediator.
“This is a critical and decisive moment for Darfur,” British Prime Minister said. Although he praised Sudan for announcing a ceasefire, and called on all parties to join it, he singled out the government of Sudan for possible punishment. “Of course, if parties do not come to the ceasefire, there’s a possibility we will impose further sanctions on the government,” he said.
Michael O’Neill, Britain’s special envoy on Sudan, read out an amended statement in the prime minister’s name in Sirte later the same day. “We stand ready to take tough action with our partners against any party that obstructs progress including new sanctions,” it said.
But al-Bashir has chosen to treat Brown’s choice of words as deliberate. The Sudanese foreign ministry summoned Rosalind Marsden, the British ambassador to Khartoum, to protest.
SUDAN WANTS PUBLIC APOLOGY
Al-Bashir went further by demanding a public apology. He shook his head vigorously when it was put to him that there might have been a misunderstanding.
“We very well read and understand English”, he replied. “There was no misunderstanding at all. The statement was very clear.”
He said the Darfur issue would have been solved by now if there had not been a constant pattern of external intervention, stretching back to long before Brown’s weekend statement.
“What we suffer here and in Darfur in particular, and the problems in Sudan in general, are caused by these three powers, Britain, France and the United States,” he said. The three countries continually adopted resolutions at the UN to punish Sudan, he added.
Sudan has come under fire from the three countries in the UN security council for being primarily responsible for the activities of government forces and janjaweed militia in burning villages, raping women and driving hundreds of thousands of people into camps for the displaced in 2003 and 2004.
A Downing Street spokesman said Mark Malloch Brown, the minister for Africa, had telephoned Nafi Ali Nafi, the chief Sudanese negotiator in Libya, on Sunday to explain that the prime minister had meant to say sanctions might be imposed on the Darfurian rebels as well as on the government.
“The prime minister’s written statement is on the website”, the spokesman said. “It covers any omission in his earlier oral statement. We’ve accepted there was an omission. We’re aware it’s caused some offence.”
(Excerpt from the Guardian)