African Union to send peacekeepers to Sudan’s Darfur region
By ANTHONY MITCHELL, Associated Press Writer
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, July 06, 2004 (AP) –The African Union said it would send several hundred peacekeepers to the Darfur region of western Sudan, where thousands have been killed and more than a million black Africans have fled attacks by Arab militiamen.
The announcement came Monday as members of the 53-nation group gathered for a summit, where they were urged by a top economic adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to refuse to pay their huge foreign debts if rich nations did not cancel them.
The 300 soldiers will be the first peacekeeping force for Darfur, described by the United Nations as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. They will protect refugees in Sudan and in neighboring Chad.
Sam Ibok, director of the African Union’s Peace and Security Division, said the troops would be quickly deployed but he did not give an exact date. He said the force would include troops from Nigeria and Rwanda and possibly Tanzania and Botswana.
The 300 peacekeepers being sent is a significant increase from the 150 unarmed African Union monitors expected to go to Darfur as part of an April cease-fire agreement in Sudan. A few African Union monitors already are there.
“We are discussing with the Sudanese government on the deployment of that protection force,” Ibok said. “We cannot describe what has happened in Darfur as genocide, but it has the potential of deteriorating or degenerating into something quite serious.”
The United Nations has said that thousands of people have been killed and more than 1 million others were forced from their homes, most taking shelter in makeshift camps along the Chad-Sudan border.
U.N. officials and human rights groups have accused Sudan of backing the Arab militias, engaged in a campaign to violently expel African farmers from the vast western region. Annan has said the crisis is “bordering on ethnic cleansing.”
During a visit to the region last week, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell won a commitment from Sudan’s President Omar el-Bashir to contain the militias and allow human rights monitors into Darfur.
Powell had earlier said that if Sudan refuses to take decisive steps to cut its ties to the Arab militias, Sudan cannot expect to have normal relations with the United States.
Up to 30,000 people have been killed in the uprising, and the U.S. Agency for International Development believes the number could grow to 300,000 if aid doesn’t reach those in desperate need.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Sachs, a top economic adviser to Annan, said African nations should ignore their debt. His comments were made at a conference on hunger, on the eve of a Africa Union summit, which estimates sub-Saharan Africa has foreign debts of $201 billion.
“The time has come to end this charade. The debts are unaffordable,” said Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special adviser to Annan on global anti-poverty targets. “If they won’t cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves.”
The leaders of Ethiopia, Mauritius, Sudan, Uganda, Mozambique, Mali and Burkina Faso attended Monday’s hunger conference.