All-party group of MPs call on Ottawa to take lead on Sudan

OTTAWA, Nov 4 (AFP) — Members of parliament from all four parties in the Canadian House of Commons called on Ottawa to take the lead for urgent international action to end the civil war in Sudan.

Displaced women walk in front of a Rwandan soldier belonging to the African Union Force and patrolling a section of the Abu Shouk displaced camp on the outskirts of El-Fasher, Sudan.(AFP).

Leading the group, David Kilgour, a member of the governing Liberal Party and a former secretary of state for Africa and Latin America, called on Prime Minister Paul Martin to act immediately.

Kilgour recalled, at a press conference, that Martin was planning to visit Khartoum later this month. This, said Kilgour, was “an opportunity to show the world that Canada will not stand by and watch hundreds of thousands of innocent people die.”

Martin, according to Kilgour, had to “demand more than empty promises from Sudan’s head of state Omar el-Bashir.”

Stockwell Day, of the right-of-centre Conservative Party, and Alexa McDonough of the leftist New Democrats, both said Martin should avoid any efforts by the Khartoum regime to “sanitize” the Canadian leader’s visit to Khartoum.

Day admitted that “Canada today does not have the (military strength) available” for any major peacekeeping operation in Sudan, but he said Canada could provide logistical support to any African Union military mission.

McDonough said Martin should “not just whisper into the ears of the Sudanese government,” but make a real effort to press on the Khartoum regime the urgency for it to comply with international demands for the end of the killing in the Darfur region.

Kilgour said the time for action was overdue, claiming “the government of Sudan has oceans of blood on its hands.”

The MPs were speaking just hours after Jan Pronk, the UN’s top official dealing with the Sudan crisis, warned: “Fighting is breaking out in more and more places, parties are provoking one another, militias are ganging up.

“Darfur may easily enter a state of anarchy — a total collapse of law and order.”

A vast desert region in the west of Sudan, Darfur has been wracked by violence since a rebel uprising against the Arab-led government in Khartoum in February 2003.

The government responded in part by using proxy Arab militias to put down the rebellion, and those militias went on to carry out a brutal, scorched-earth campaign that has led to an estimated 70,000 deaths.