Sudan FM hails weaker wording in new draft before UN Security Council
KHARTOUM, July 30 (AFP) — Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail hailed the weaker wording in a new draft resolution on the Darfur crisis before the UN Security Council and expressed confidence it would be adopted.
“We expect an attenuated resolution to be issued by the Security Council today,” Ismail said in comments published by the independent Khartoum daily Akhbar Al-Youm on Friday.
“The friends of the Sudan and the Sudanese diplomacy have succeeded in trimming the resolution and curbing its extremity and aberration,” he said.
A new draft presented by Britain and the United States on Thursday dropped the threat of “sanctions” against Khartoum, replacing it with the milder word “measures”.
Ismail said his ministry had set out a two-pronged plan to counter the draft resolution — “either to block its adoption altogether or to strive, in cooperation with our friends, to remove from it such references as genocide, ethnic cleansing and other extreme points and apparently this is what we have so far succeeded in achieving just hours before the vote.”
During a visit to Kuwait Thursday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell Thursday defended the draft’s new wording.
“The word measures does not exclude anything that might be a measure. It seemed to be a word that is more acceptable to a broader number of members of the Security Council,” he said.
The United Nations describes the situation in Darfur as the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis.
Up to 50,000 people have died and more than a million been driven from their homes since ethnic minority rebels launched an uprising early last year against the Sudanese army and its Arab militia allies.
The international community holds the state-sponsored militias largely responsible for the crisis and, in an agreement with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan earlier this month, Khartoum undertook to disarm them within 90 days.
Emigre Sudanese opposition leader Mohammed Osman al-Mirghani meanwhile appealed to the leaders of Egypt, Libya and Chad to intervene swiftly to find a solution to the crisis.
Mirghani, who chairs the National Democratic Alliance umbrella group, voiced his “extreme anxiety” about the situation in Darfur in a statement carried by Khartoum newspapers and released from his base in neighbouring Eritrea.
The opposition leader warned that the situation in Darfur could pave the way for foreign intervention, “jeopardising the Sudan’s sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and people.”
Mirghani, who is also leader of the northern opposition Democratic Unionist Party, said he had sent messages to the leaders of Egypt, Libya and Chad — Hosni Mubarak, Moamer Kadhafi and Idriss Deby — calling on them to “move immediately to contain the Darfur crisis.”
In a separate message to Sudan President Omar al-Beshir, he called on him to cooperate with the three neighbouring countries to “block the door before foreign military intervention and before internationalisation of the issue.”