KHARTOUM, 14 February 2005 — Sudan hit out yesterday at a call by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for EU or NATO intervention in the war-torn Darfur region, saying the world body ought to back the existing African Union observer mission. “We believe that the African Union has the full mandate and capabilities to accomplish its mission satisfactorily and we expect that no other agency would tamper with this mission,” Junior Foreign Minister Naguib Al-Khair Abdel Wahab told AFP.
“We commend the work done by the African Union which has been recognized by the UN as the major body responsible for supervising the peace efforts in Darfur, and we expect the UN secretary-general to spare no effort to bolster the AU in carrying out its assigned mission,” Abdel Wahab said.
Annan had called at a security conference in Munich yesterday for urgent Western intervention in Darfur to halt the savage repression of a two-year-old ethnic minority uprising by state-sponsored Arab militias. “People are dying, every single day, while we fail to protect them. Additional measures are urgently required. Those organizations with real capacity — and NATO as well as the EU are well represented in this room — must give serious consideration to what, in practical terms, they can do to help end this tragedy,” the UN chief said.
Meanwhile, one of the two main ethnic minority rebel groups in Darfur yesterday rejected an offer by former southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army to provide peacekeeping troops for the war-wrecked region. “The Sudan Liberation Army is the only force capable of and responsible for protecting the people and region of Darfur,” its spokesman Mohammed Hamed Ali said in Cairo.
Ali rejected SPLA leader John Garang’s proposal for a joint stabilization force in Darfur made up of his militiamen, government troops and peacekeepers from the African Union. “The Khartoum regime’s forces are the ones responsible for the tragedy in Darfur and committed most of the massacres in the region,” he said.
He charged that ever since their deployment last year, truce observers from the African Union had “sat idly by while government planes mounted air raids and the Janjaweed militias carried out massacres.” A peacekeeping force should be made up of “UN troops because they have the capacity and necessary means to protect Darfur,” he said. The rebel spokesman insisted that, despite his comments, he continued to hold the SPLM leader in “high esteem”.
