UN chief says no meetings with Sudan president unless necessary, opposes elections delay

March 25, 2010 (KHARTOUM) — The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said he will not hold talks with Sudanese president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir during the Arab League summit in Libya stressing that he would meet him only under limited circumstances.

The ICC indicted Bashir last year on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but stopped short of including a charge of genocide. The United Nations says as many as 300,000 people have been killed since conflict erupted in Darfur in 2003, although Sudan rejects that figure.

“The court charged him [Bashir] with crimes against humanity, therefore I must respect the ICC decision. My role is to preserve justice” Ban told the London based Al-Hayat newspaper in an interview published Friday.

The UN chief has been advised by the legal department in 2008 to distance himself politically from the Sudanese president and since the warrant he only met him twice.

Asked whether he is sticking to the advise, Ban said that he has to discuss with his legal adviser “to discuss any exceptions”.

On elections, Ban criticized Bashir’s vow to expel and mutilate foreign elections observers who call for delaying elections.

“I do not want to comment on this type of undesirable speech particularly at this time in. It is up to the Sudanese government to decide whether they will hold these elections as scheduled or postpone it” he said.

But Ban appeared to be opposed to the idea of postponing the elections even though he recognized “enormous logistical challenges”.

“I understand that elections could be postponed or delayed for a short period of time, but why should be made to postpone the month of November? I am not sure it can be properly arranged at that time” he said.

Ban’s statements pour cold shower over opposition parties demand for a postponement. They have submitted a memo in this regard to the Sudanese presidency threatening that they would boycott elections if no rescheduling occurs.

UN relations with opposition parties are already tense over accusations that their mission in Sudan was complicit in an improper switching an award to print the ballots from a Slovenian company to a local one belonging to the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) opening the door for fraud.

The leader of the Umma Reform and Renewal Party (URRP) Mubarak Al-Fadil wrote a letter to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon complaining against the Chief Electoral Officer at UNMIS Ray Kennedy for allowing this to happen.

Yesterday, UNMIS Chief Haile Menkerios wrote a response on behalf of Ban stressing that the UN was not involved in the decision taken by the NEC.

“I would like to clarify that elections in Sudan are nationally owned process and the United Nations’ (UN) mandate remains limited to technical assistance and support only. Accordingly, the decision to print the aforementioned ballot tickets locally was taken solely, as it should be, by the National Election Commission (NEC)” Menkerios said.

Menkerios said that the UN position on elections “has remained consistent and will continue to be so”.

“We believe these elections need to be free and fair and we will do all within our mandate to advise, encourage and assist that they be so”.

Sudan is set to stage its first multi-party elections in 24 years from April 11 to 13 as part of a 2005 peace agreement that ended a decades-old civil war between north and south.

(ST)