AU’s Mbeki meets Qatari officials as Darfur peace talks flounders
December 30, 2010 (NAIROBI) – The head of the African Union High-Level Panel on Sudan, Thabo Mbeki, met on Thursday with Qatar’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Ahmad Bin Abdulla Al-Mahmud, amid fears that the Doha-based peace talks between Sudan government and Darfur rebels could now be in peril.
But the two main rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) led by Khalil Ibrahim and the Sudan Liberation Movement of Abdul Wahid Nur, remain outside the talks.
JEM walked out of the process in May and returned last November to Doha where the rebel group is holding talks on ceasefire with the government delegation there whereas SLM never took part to begin with.
On the other hand, LJM finalized talks with Khartoum delegation and the mediation is preparing a draft peace agreement but the two parties still disagree on power sharing file.
Sudan’s official news agency reported on Thursday that the meeting, which was attended by a host of Qatari officials and members of Mbeki’s team, had discussed the progress of the peace talks in Doha between the Sudanese government and Darfur rebel groups.
The former South African president Mbeki visited Qatar on 22 December but later left and returned on Thursday after Sudan President Al-Bashir threatened to pull out the government’s negotiating delegation in Doha if no peace agreement is reached by Thursday December 30.
Al-Bashir’s threat was regretted by the joint UN-AU mediator to Darfur, Djibril Bassole, who told Sudan Tribune that Al-Bashir’s ultimatum threatens the whole process.
According to SUNA report, the Qatari minister appraised Mbeki team on the efforts exerted by the Qatari mediation to prepare the grounds for comprehensive peace talks in order to yield a lasting solution to Darfur problem in the near future.
Mbeki could be making a fresh push to take the Darfur dossier away from Bassole. However, sources say that Doha is not enthusiastic about Mbeki taking over from the joint mediator.
In a report submitted to the AU last month, Mbeki appeared to be directing criticism at the joint mediator.
“While the AU-UN Joint Chief Mediator has made efforts to involve Darfurian civil society in the peace talks, his effort has, to date, been purely consultative, selective and ad hoc. This has had the unfortunate result of becoming an issue within Darfur itself. And by limiting the talks to the armed groups, this process has empowered the armed movements to act as spoilers if they so wish, and the two most significant movements, the JEM and the SLM-Abdul-Wahid, have refused to participate in the Doha talks, rendering any agreement that are signed moot”.
Darfur conflict broke out in 2003 after rebels belonging mostly to African ethnic groups took up arms against the Sudanese government, accusing it of sidelining the region in terms of development and power-sharing.
An abusive counterinsurgency campaign orchestrated by Khartoum and its allied Arab militias in the region created one of the world’s worst humanitarian situations where nearly 300,000 people died and more than 2 million were displaced, according to UN figures.
(ST)