Japan considers debt relief for Sudan
March 6, 2008 (TOKYO) — Japan is considering offering debt relief to Sudan as an incentive for Khartoum to take action to end the Darfur conflict and support a fragile north-south peace deal, officials said Thursday.
The offer comes as Nafie Ali Nafie, a top aide to Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir, holds talks in Japan, which has said it will voice concern about the bloodshed in Darfur.
“We are studying the possibility of a debt waiver of our government loans to Sudan to support the peace process after the north-south civil war,” a foreign ministry official told AFP.
“Apart from the Darfur conflict, Japan has been supporting the peace process” that ended the 21-year north-south civil war in 2005, he said.
But Japan would make debt relief contingent on concrete steps towards a peaceful end to the Darfur conflict, another official at the ministry said.
“Sudan must first change its attitude on the Darfur issue to receive debt relief from Japan,” the senior official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
Japan along with Western countries suspended loans to Sudan in 1983 on the outbreak of civil war between Khartoum’s Arab-dominated government and the largely non-Arab, non-Muslim south.
An estimated two million people died in Africa’s longest-running civil war which ended with a still-fragile January 2005 power-sharing deal.
But another conflict is raging in the western Darfur region in what the United States has branded genocide.
International organisations estimate that 200,000 people have died in Darfur and more than a third of the six-million population displaced since 2003. Khartoum says the figures are greatly exaggerated.
Sudan was designated among 42 “heavily indebted poor countries” in a 1996 initiative by the World Bank but has yet to receive debt relief from the Paris Club of creditor countries.
According to Jiji Press, Japan is considering debt waivers of 3.2 billion yen (31 million dollars) of the 45 billion yen (437 million dollars) loans Sudan owes to Japan.
(AFP)