KHARTOUM, 8 September 2004 — Sudan has proposed to swap the Eritreans who hijacked a plane to Khartoum last month for Sudanese rebels said to be training at camps in Eritrea, a news service close to the government reported. The Sudanese Media Center quoted presidential political affairs adviser Qutbi Al-Mahdi on Monday night as saying Sudan would not otherwise repatriate the 15 Eritreans who took part in the hijacking. Mahdi was not available yesterday.
Mahdi told the news service: “The government will not hand over the accused to their country.” But he added: “If Eritrea agrees to send the rebels in camps in Eritrea, then the government would move to send the criminals back.”
The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says the Sudanese government has given asylum to 60 of the 75 Eritreans who were on the Libyan plane at the time of the hijacking. They were being deported from Libya to Eritrea.
A Sudanese court has convicted the other 15 of hijacking and UNHCR said their status was still unclear. Sudanese officials had previously said there were 76 Eritreans on the plane. The 15 took control of the Libyan military transport plane on Aug. 27 with objects that included a can opener, three razor blades and two lighters, a Sudanese court was told. They were sentenced to five years in prison.
Meanwhile, a senior Sudanese official said that Washington’s threat of sanctions against Sudan over the Darfur crisis is part of a US conspiracy aimed at destroying the government in Khartoum as it did in Iraq and Somalia. “Sudan is not afraid of the threat of sanctions by the United States, which is using the crisis in Darfur to weaken and destroy the government of Sudan in a similar fashion in which they devastated Iraq and Somalia,” said Angelo Beda, deputy speaker of Sudan’s Parliament. Beda, speaking at a news conference in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa late on Monday, was referring to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and US support of a Somalia peace operation that ended in humiliation in 1993.
The UN Security Council gave Sudan 30 days to disarm and prosecute Arab Janjaweed militia accused of killing, raping and driving villagers from their land in an 18-month conflict or face unspecified sanctions.
UN envoy Jan Pronk has called for more pressure to be put on Khartoum but with opinion split among Security Council members after the expiry of the deadline, the United Nations is not expected to take action soon. US Ambassador John Danforth has warned that the threat of sanctions was not going to go away and the European Union said on Saturday it would draw up sanctions against Khartoum, including possible measures against its oil industry, which could be enacted at the request of the United Nations.
