DAKAR, 14 March 2008 — Leaders of the world’s biggest Islamic body opened talks yesterday to tackle difficult issues from poverty to hostility toward Islam, but those goals were quickly overshadowed by a confrontation between Chad and Sudan.
Heads of state of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) — the second largest inter-governmental bloc after the United Nations — convened in the Senegalese capital Dakar for a two-day meeting to overhaul its charter.
The meeting, however, started on a sour note as Chad accused its neighbor and fellow OIC member Sudan of launching a rebel attack across its border.
“The Chadian government informs national and international opinion that Sudan on March 12, 2008, launched several heavily armed columns against Chad,” an official statement released in the Chadian capital N’Djamena said.
It was a major embarrassment for Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade who had billed the summit as the opportunity for a definitive peace deal between the two oil-producing states, after five previous agreements had collapsed.
The presidents of Chad and Sudan yesterday held a meeting in the presence of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a bid to seal a peace accord, sources close to mediators said.
Before the meeting between Sudanese President Omar Bashir and Chadian leader Idriss Deby, Sudan’s deputy foreign minister described as “complete nonsense” accusations by Chad that a rebel force based inside Sudan had crossed the border to launch an offensive.
Bashir failed to turn up for a previous peace meeting organized by President Wade in Dakar on Wednesday night.
Efforts to review the OIC’s 40-article charter also appeared to have run aground after foreign ministers broke off their discussions without agreement on Wednesday, despite having extended their two days of talks by an extra day.
Long criticized as being ineffective and bureaucratic, OIC officials hope a revision of the charter can assign the group a more active role in fighting poverty and militancy.
“It’s up to the heads of state to make the decision,” Wade told the opening ceremony of the summit. “We are on the point of adopting the charter and we hope this adoption will come.”
The charter discussions include calls for more aid from the OIC’s richest members to its poorest states, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa where radical groups like Al-Qaeda are attempting to gain a foothold.
A $10 billion fund for Islamic development set up by the organization has so far received pledges for only $2.6 billion.
Another key change would allow the group to take decisions by a two-thirds majority, instead of requiring unanimity — difficult to achieve in a large body with such cultural and political divisions, spanning Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Some members are pushing to make OIC membership conditional on a state having a “majority” Muslim population, but this has been resisted by mixed-religion nations like Uganda.
Pakistan was also insisting the new charter should make potential members resolve their conflicts with existing members before being allowed to adhere — reflecting its long-running dispute with neighbor India over the Kashmir region.
With several prominent leaders not present some delegates had called for a decision on the charter to be postponed until a Cairo summit in three years.
