Darfur shows fragility of Africa peace efforts-AU head
By William Maclean
ADDIS ABABA, July 1 (Reuters) – The humanitarian crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region is evidence of the uncertain ability of the world’s poorest continent to prevent fresh wars, the head of the African Union said in remarks made available on Thursday.
“The situation in the continent remains mixed,” AU Commission Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare said in a frank annual survey of Africa’s conflicts.
“The progress so far achieved (in ending Africa’s wars) has remained fragile with the likelihood that they could be derailed and that fresh crises could always erupt at any time. Darfur is an eloquent illustration of this state of affairs,” Konare said.
U.S. officials and human rights groups accuse Khartoum of arming and supporting Janjaweed Arab militias to raid black African villages in the troubled region of western Sudan in a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
The Sudanese government denies the accusations and calls the Janjaweed outlaws. The United Nations says 2 million people have been caught up in the fighting, creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The 53-nation AU has deployed an initial contingent of observers to Darfur and its officials have brokered previous, fruitless talks between Khartoum and the Darfur rebels.
Konare, a former president of Mali, is due to visit Darfur on Friday to attend peace talks among Sudanese political groups in the Chadian capital N’djamena.
Mediators from the European Union, the United Nations and the United States are also due to take part to try to pressure the Khartoum government to disarm the Janjaweed.
“Clearly the situation in Darfur is the litmus test of the capacity of the African Union to act effectively to address the conflicts that are tearing the continent apart and to implement its own principles,” Konare said in remarks released at a closed session of AU foreign ministers ahead of an AU summit at the body’s headquarters in Addis Ababa next Tuesday and Wednesday.
He described the activities of the Janjaweed as “atrocious”.
Konare’s two-year-old AU, the successor body to the defunct Organisation of African Unity, is under international pressure to take a lead in peacekeeping on the continent.
It plans to set up a peacekeeping unit called the African Standby Force and deploy it at five regional bases by 2005, growing to a continental force by 2010.
In a summary of other conflicts on the continent, Konare said peace efforts were seeing various levels of success in southern Sudan, Liberia, Burundi, Somalia and Comoros.
But he was cautious about the Democratic Republic of Congo, saying “a lot of difficulties” had been caused by conflict in its lawless east, Ivory Coast, which remained “worrying”, and the Central African Republic, where the security situation was “precarious” and peace efforts were “fragile”.
He urged renewed efforts to break a stalemate in efforts to end a border row between former foes Ethiopia and Eritrea.