African Union Chairman Konare will not be missed by Darfur
By Wasil Ali*
March 9, 2008 — The outgoing African Union (AU) chief Alpha Oumar Konare is due to leave his post officially next April and will be succeeded by Jean Ping who was the deputy prime minister and foreign minister of Gabon.
I have little or no information about Ping and therefore unable to speculate about his competence in tackling the issues facing the explosive and unpredictable African continent. Of course the Darfur crisis is supposed to top the AU agenda under Ping.
Personally I have little faith if any in the AU as a body or in its leadership. I have written extensively about its destructive role in making the Darfur crisis worst than what it already is. Of course some may raise a perfectly legitimate question “and who are you anyway to make such a sweeping indictment of the AU?”.
But no one can dispute the testimonies of all major Darfur rebel groups I spoke to at its highest levels. All of them had nothing but bad things to say to me about the AU leadership particularly Konare, Salem Ahmed Salem and Sam Ibok. This includes Minnawi’s faction which the only Darfur rebel group to sign a peace agreement with Khartoum.
One of Minnawi’s closest advisers told me that they were told by the former US deputy Secretary of State Robert Zolleick that the AU “will ensure the implementation of the agreement”. Of course we all know that the DPA is pretty much dead. If it was for these rebel groups they would not have a single AU soldier present in any area of Darfur.
Under Konare leadership the AU has moved itself to align its interests with those of the Sudanese government. AU chairman Konare has done everything possible to please Khartoum in terms of peace negotiations and weakening a UN-AU peacekeeping force that has yet to come.
I will not go into the details of all the things Konare has done that directly or indirectly prolonged the unspeakable tragedy of the Darfurian people. Achieving peace in Darfur was obviously not a concern to Konare but rather was to market the AU as a regional body to international powers.
What is my proof? The AU along with Sudan boycotted a Paris conference on Darfur and Konare in particular was very hostile to it. At one time he spoke about plans to hold a New York peace conference on Darfur that will “not be a continuation of the Paris conference”. These statements were made 2 months after the Paris conference. So peace in Darfur was never a goal for Konare no matter what he says.
Afterwards Konare insisted in the negotiations on a Darfur peacekeeping force that the command and control would be to the AU which led to a delay in the adoption of a UN Security Council resolution on the matter. It also led to a reluctance by many countries to provides resources to the force. Later he rejected several non-African battalions for unknown reasons before saying that Africa will supply all the troops. Up till this day Sudan has stuck to its insistence that it will not accept non-African troops.
To make things worst the AU has been totally impotent to protect the people of Darfur in the camps who are daily victims to government and militia attacks. It is of no surprise that the Darfur refugees have demanded that the UN forces come to replace the AU. They simply don’t trust the AU and you can’t blame them. Today the Sudanese government has launched a wide scale campaign against villages in Western Darfur captured in pictures by the New York Times. These are things that the AU has been seeing throughout the last five years but has been unmoved by it.
The mess that Darfur is in today in my opinion could have been avoided if the AU has been kept out of the issue. However Khartoum, understandably insisted on having the AU involved so they can carry out their brutal Darfur policies. AU chairman Konare has helped the Sudanese government in carrying out its long term plan of excluding Darfur from the political equation in the upcoming elections. The result is thousands of deaths and millions of displaced Darfurians waiting for tomorrow that never comes.
Perhaps years from now Konare will look at himself in the mirror and realize that he stepped on his conscience ignoring the moans of the tired, the hungry and the wounded in these refugee camps in Sudan and Chad. Only then will he see the blood of innocent Darfuris on his hands. Unfortunately there is no argument he can make to explain what he has done throughout the years in his post.
Bye-Bye Professor Konare. You will most certainly not be missed!
* The author is a Sudan Tribune journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]