PanAfrican Parliament to send mission to Darfur

JOHANNESBURG, Sept 30 (Reuters) – The Pan-African Parliament (PAP) will send a fact-finding mission to Sudan’s ravaged Darfur region, where the U.N. says the world’s worst humanitarian crisis is taking place, an official said on Thursday.

PAP president Gertrude Mongela told reporters the decision was taken on Wednesday night and the parliament still had to decide on the composition of the team and the date of departure.

“We have heard from the media, we have heard from the United Nations, we have heard from other people … so we said it’s high time we send our own delegation to see what is happening on the ground,” she said.

The U.N. estimates that 50,000 people have been killed in the conflict which flared up in February after years of skirmishes between Arab nomads and non-Arab farmers over scarce resources in the arid western region of Sudan.

It says that close to 1.5 million people have been driven from their homes by Arab militia known as Janjaweed, which have also been accused by rights groups of a campaign of rape.

The U.N’s special envoy to Sudan on Wednesday urged African states to speed up moves to send a large force to Darfur. The African Union is mandated by the U.N. Security Council to send a force and is trying to gather 3,000-5,000 troops.

Sudan has rejected charges that it supports the Janjaweed or that rapes are as common as claimed by Amnesty International after the the rights group recently visited Darfur.

PAP, modelled on its European counterpart, was launched on September 16 amid great fanfare and fears it would become a costly talk shop lacking the teeth to root out Africa’s long list of dictators and entrench democracy.