South Africa to send 284 peacekeepers to Sudan’s Darfur region

JOHANNESBURG, Feb 25 (AFP) — A contingent of 284 South African troops will depart for Sudan’s troubled Darfur region next week on a peacekeeping mission, South African Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota said on Friday.

Nigerian soldiers arrive in El-Fasher.

This would indeed be a very difficult mission of the African Union, but the preparation has been very thorough,” the minister told soldiers at a military base near the central South African city of Bloemfontein.

The contingent, which will include women, will fly to Sudan on Monday, Lekota was quoted by the SAPA news agency as saying, adding that this will be the first full contingent South Africa is deploying to Darfur.

He said the group would join 39 observers who had been in Darfur since July 2004.

Lekota said the soldiers’ mission in Darfur would be to “intervene and stop the fighting with the aim of stabilising the area so that the region’s people could rebuild their lives”.

“These tasks will present you with huge responsibility as you will be expected to comply with our country’s laws and with international law,” Lekota told soldiers.

Two years after an ethnic minority uprising prompted Sudan’s military-backed government to unleash a savage crackdown in Darfur, 1.6 million displaced people face the threat of famine and the world remains at loggerheads how best to intervene.

A 10-month-old ceasefire in the huge western region the size of France has failed to take hold amid persistent reports of government air raids and massacres by allied militias.

Peace talks sponsored by the African Union in a key test of the continent’s ability to police its own affairs broke down in acrimony in December, prompting increasingly desperate UN officials to call for urgent Western intervention in what they describe as the world’s worst current humanitarian disaster.