TRIPOLI: The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) yesterday announced a project to step up help to the troubled Sudanese region of Darfur following last month’s expulsion of 13 international aid agencies.
The plan envisages “urgent and continued aid services,” help for refugees to go home and rebuilding in the war-torn western region, according to documents presented to a conference in Libya of humanitarian agencies in OIC member states.
A Sudanese opposition leader has told a visiting US envoy that the government and its allies have forgotten the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Islamist leader Hassan Turabi says that instead they are consumed with efforts to protect Sudanese president from the arrest warrant by an international tribunal.
Turabi met yesterday with Scott Gration, the US envoy who is expected to visit Darfur. He warned that Bashir’s expulsion of 16 foreign and local aid groups in retaliation for the warrant has deepened the misery of millions of Darfurians.
Meanwhile, the Sudanese election commission has put back both the presidential and the parliamentary elections planned for 2009 until next year, local media have reported.
The Sudan Tribune quoted Abdellah Ahmed Abdellah, deputy chairman of Sudan’s National Electoral Commission as saying yesterday that the commission had decided to postpone both polls by seven months, to February 2010. Sudan’s last general election was in April 1986. In the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the decades-long civil war between the north and south of Sudan, a general election by July 2009 at the latest had been promised.
