Libya confirms plans for `Mini Summit’ on Sudan’s Darfur crisis

TRIPOLI, Libya, Oct 16, 2004 (AP) — Libya confirmed that the leaders of Sudan , Egypt, Chad and Nigeria would join Moammar Gadhafi for a “mini-summit” Sunday on Sudan’s Darfur region, which the U.N. calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The summit will deal with security, ending the fighting, and getting humanitarian aid to people displaced by the violence, Foreign Minister Abdel Rahman Shalqam [photo] said Saturday.

The violence has grown since February 2003, when two rebel groups took up arms against the government. The conflict has since grown into a counterinsurgency in which pro-government Arab militiamen have raped and killed non-Arab villagers.

Nearly 1.5 million people have left their villages to flee the violence, and tens of thousands of people have died. Some of the refugees have crossed into neighboring Chad.

“The summit is meant to discuss three issues: humanitarian aid to the displaced people, security, and reaching a final solution for the crisis,” Shalqam told The Associated Press.

A delegation of the smaller of Darfur’s two rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement, traveled to Tripoli but will not be allowed to participate in the summit, which is only for heads of state, a foreign ministry official told AP on condition of anonymity.

The larger rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Army, indicated it would not attend the summit, although it said it had been invited. “We don’t have time to go there without knowing why we’re going there,” said SLA spokesman Abdul Latif, based in the U.K.

The summit was to begin Sunday night, after Muslims break their fast for the holy month of Ramadan.

The foreign ministers of all five countries were to prepare for the summit in meetings Sunday morning.