Darfur mini-summit aims to ward off UN sanctions with African solution

TRIPOLI, Oct 18 (AFP) — The leaders of Sudan and four neighbouring states, in a bid to avert UN sanctions on Khartoum, pledged to work to resolve the Darfur crisis at the African level, but rebel groups remained sceptical.

Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir, right, and Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail attend a meeting in Tripoli, Libya Sunday, Oct. 17, 2004.

Sudan’s President Omar al-Beshir and the leaders of Libya, Chad, Egypt and Nigeria held talks late into the night at a Tripoli hotel in a summit hastily convened after the international community turned up the heat on Khartoum.

A 20-month-old civil war in the western Sudanese region of Darfur has displaced 1.5 million people and spawned what the United Nations has termed the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis.

Khartoum has been accused of abetting massacres by its proxy militias and not doing enough to protect civilians, with the United States and some rights groups even talking of genocide.

In a joint statemement issued after the overnight meeting, the regional leaders stressed their “rejection of all foreign intervention in this purely African question”.

The UN Security Council in early September threatened sanctions on Sudan’s vital oil industry if Khartoum failed to rapidly rein in the Janjaweed militias. Western powers have since renewed the threat.

Sudan’s Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail said the summit had “sent a message to the international community affirming that Africa can assume all its responsibilities and refuses all international intervention”.

But Darfur’s two main rebel groups, who were in Tripoli for talks on the sidelines of the one-day summit, expressed concern that the gathering was only designed to give Khartoum breathing space by keeping sanctions at bay.

“Egypt and Chad want Libya to pressure Darfur rebels to avoid an internationalisation of the conflict and force them to sign agreements that will not meet their aspirations,” an official for the Justice and Equality Movement rebel group told AFP on Sunday.

The joint statement issued in Tripoli urged the rebel leaders to sign a humanitarian protocol with Khartoum during their next round of direct talks scheduled for October 21.

Ismail also renewed his government’s invitation for power-sharing in Darfur but said the details of such a political solution would have to be discussed at a later stage.

Sudan is already technically a federal state but organised around a strong central power.

An end to “marginalisation” was one of the main goals of rebel groups in Darfur — whose soil is rich in natural resources — when they rose up in February 2003.

Olu Adeniji, the foreign minister of Nigeria which currently chairs the African Union (AU), said the summit welcomed “the decision of the Sudanese government to significantly increase the number of AU troops in Darfur and appealed to all African nations to contribute to this force.”

The AU has spearheaded international efforts to resolve the crisis and is in the process of deploying a 4,500-strong peacekeeping force from around five African countries to Sudan to oversee the peace process.

Adeniji said talks were underway with the United States and the European Union to provide logistic and financial aid to the pan-African force.

But the meeting between Beshir, Libyan leader Kadhafi, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and Presidents Idriss Deby of Chad and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria did not produce a specific peace plan.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s envoy Jan Pronk is due to draw up a report at the end of this month on the Sudanese government’s efforts to meet international demands.

The UN’s World Health Organisation recently charged that 70,000 civilians displaced by the Darfur conflict had died in camps from disease and malnutrition since March, a figure which Khartoum has disputed.

Chad is hosting more than 200,000 out of the 1.4 million people displaced.