South Africa agrees to send more troops to Sudan’s Darfur
November 6, 2007 (CAPE TOWN) — South African President Thabo Mbeki agreed following a meeting with his Sudanese counterpart Omar Hassan al-Bashir on Tuesday to strengthen South Africa’s commitment to a U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force for Darfur.
At a banquet after the leaders met in Cape Town, Mbeki said he was committed “to add to the military and police contingents we have sent to Darfur as part of AMIS (African Union Mission in Sudan) in keeping with the needs of the AU-UN hybrid force.”
After lengthy negotiations Khartoum accepted to allow the deployment of 26,000 United Nations and African Union troops to Darfur early next year to try to stem 4-1/2 years of violence which AU troops alone have been unable to quell.
South African President Thabo Mbeki came under pressure from Sudanese leader Omar al-Beshir to increase the number of peacekeeping troops in Darfur as the pair held talks in Cape Town on Wednesday.
A top advisor to Beshir said that the Sudanese president wanted South Africa to increase the 600 troops which are currently stationed in the troubled western region when a beefed up peacekeeping mission begins operations.
“Currently we now have 7,000 African troops and we need to increase them up to 26,000,” Mustafa Osman Ismail told SABC radio.
“Sudan wants South Africa to increase the number of South African soldiers in Darfur.”
But deployment of the hybrid force has been hampered by a dispute over its composition. Bashir said on Tuesday international meddling would backfire.
The government in Khartoum is much keener to see African troops on its soil rather than UN blue helmets and a greater presence of South African soldiers would allay some of its concerns.
South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who also took part in the talks, said that the situation in Darfur was complicated.
“The problem is that there are lots of stakeholders, lots of players,” she told the radio.
Beshir and Mbeki were expected to resume their talks on Wednesday after a state banquet for the Sudanese leader on Tuesday night.
Beshir was greeted with a 21-gun salute and inspected the national guard before heading into the talks at Mbeki’s official residence.
Ahead of the meeting, the South African foreign ministry said the two men were likely to discuss the political upheaval in Khartoum, sparked by a recent decision of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement to pull its ministers out of the national unity government.
It acted in protest against the slow implementation of a peace deal that ended decades of civil war between the military in the north and rebels in the south of the country.
Ismail expressed hope that the situation would soon be resolved, saying: “We hope that after the president will go back from South Africa … the ministers will go back.”
The visit has triggered criticism from South Africa’s main opposition Democratic Alliance which said it was inappropriate to roll out the red carpet for Beshir, given his failure to stop the bloodshed in Darfur, where the UN says more than 200,000 people have died.
“While it is important that South Africa assists to bring peace to the region, we must not do so in a manner that negates a principled stance for human rights,” foreign affairs spokeswoman Sheila Camerer.
(AFP/Reuters)