|
|
 advertisement
|
AU and the challenge of a summit
Senior Correspondent, Victor Onyeka-Ben examines issues surrounding the forthcoming African Union summit noting that the outcome will go a long way towards defining the direction of the African continent's fragile peace.
The summit, slated to hold between January 23 and 24 in Khartoum, Sudan, has already been rejected by Chad, since going by AU tradition, the host country usually assumes the rotational chairmanship of the body till the next summit. That means that Sudan which already has a stigma owing to alleged crimes against humanity committed by its leaders in the war-ravaged Darfur region of the country, will assume leadership of the AU after the summit.
To press its point home, Chad summoned a meeting of Central African states last Wednesday to oppose the proposed summit holding in Khartoum or the Sudanese leader, Omar Hassan el-Bashir from assuming leadership of the AU. At the meeting, Chad's President Idriss Deby urged the United Nations (UN) to take control of Sudan's volatile Darfur region as according to him, Khartoum was using the conflict there to destabilise neighbouring states.
Deby, who faces threats from rebel attacks on Chad's eastern frontier with Sudan and from army desertions at home, made the call during the meeting of Central African leaders which he convened in N'Djamena to discuss tensions with Khartoum.
The Chadian president has accused neighbouring Sudan of backing rebels opposed to him who last month attacked the eastern town of Adre bordering Darfur, where tens of thousands of people have been killed in chaotic fighting since 2003. Khartoum has denied the Chadian accusations claiming that its army had fought against Chadian rebels when they refused to disarm or leave Sudan.
"This attempt at destabilisation knowingly orchestrated by Sudan aims to export the Darfur conflict in the sub-region, where the first victims are Chad and Central African Republic," Deby told leaders of the six-nation Central African Economic and Monetary Union (CEMAC).
The group is made up of Chad, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo Republic, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea.
Deby said the fighting in Darfur, which pits Sudanese government forces and militias against local rebels, had driven thousands of Sudanese refugees into Chad. These could only return home if security in Darfur were restored, he added.
"I would like Darfur to be placed under a UN mandate," Deby said, without explaining how he envisaged this UN control being established.
Following the December 18 attacks on Adre, Deby has launched a diplomatic offensive to try to isolate the Sudanese president within the AU, the continental diplomatic body.
Analysts believe that Deby's recent visit to President Olusegun Obasanjo at his Otta Farm may be connected with the diplomatic offensive. There have also been insinuations that Obasanjo may have to continue as the AU Chairman even after the Khartoum summit, which Chad has made clear it objects to it being hosted by Sudan.
Last week also, Deby called on the AU to move next month's summit from Sudan to Nigeria saying Sudan was too aggressive to host the summit.
"All of Africa, and particularly the CEMAC, cannot let President al-Bashir be the next president of the AU," Deby told his Central African colleagues.
The fear is rife that Chad's dispute with Sudan risks worsening what is already a messy regional problem. The United States (U.S.) and several global rights bodies have condemned the violence in Darfur as "genocide" calling for the trial of Sudanese leaders for war crimes committed in the war-torn region, which now has relative peace owing to the presence of AU peacekeepers. France has troops stationed in Chad, Africa's newest oil producer.
"The war in Darfur," said Dave Mozersky, a senior analyst for Sudan with the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, "definitely has a negative, destabilising impact on the situation in Chad ... it has created divisions for the Chadian president, within his own people and security forces.
"There is a very urgent need for the international community to take steps to recognise the regional implications of this ... if Chad descends into chaos like Darfur this could affect further to the west and south in Africa," he added.
At the N'Djamena meeting of the CEMAC, Jean Nkuete, executive secretary of the group, said the Darfur crisis posed a serious long-term threat. That threat was confirmed when last week, several Chadian rebel groups opposing Deby announced the formation of a political and military alliance to topple him, apparently heralding a growing insurgency problem for the Chadian president.
The 53-year-old former army commander himself led a revolt from the east to seize power in 1990.
It thus could be understood why Central African heads of state went to the Chadian capital, N'Djamena, for a special summit to discuss the country's dispute with Sudan.
The situation followed border unrest last month in which over 100 people were killed.
Deby warned the regional leaders that a full-scale conflict between Chad and Sudan would have incalculable consequences.
The AU has sent a delegation to N'Djamena and Khartoum as part of efforts to reduce the tension between the two countries. But observers contend that transferring the chairmanship of the body to Sudan with all the moral burden it has placed on itself over the massacre of defenceless people in Darfur, will affect how the rest of the world views the Union.
The Sudanese government, using Arab "Janjaweed" militias backed by its air force, and organised starvation, is systematically killing the black Sudanese of Darfur.
In Kosovo, Western nations under the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), undertook a humanitarian intervention and even bombed Serbia after just 5,000 civilians had been killed. But in Sudan, Africa has a likely death toll of at least 370,000 in Darfur, with calls for the trial of the perpetrators from the international community not acted upon.
It is believed that an international force with strong European support and African participation could drive the Janjaweed off, protect the suffering refugees, and allow aid to be delivered to save hundreds of thousands of lives. But it needs to happen immediately, according to aid agencies. It is possible that just the threat of such an action would convince the Sudanese government, which is the chief culprit in the crime in Darfur to not only call off the Janjaweed, but also end the killings.
After months of advocacy, the UN Security Council voted to refer Darfur to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on March 31, 2005.
Observers who contend that the genocide in Sudan was not inevitable regret that the action was the intentional result of a plan crafted by individual human beings, including President el-Bashir. Many of those architects of this genocide remain in power, still directing systematic massacres. An international indictment for genocide would force such men from the seat of power and forever brand them as some of history's worst criminals.
In October 2004, the AU, supported by the UN, pledged to send peacekeepers to Darfur to monitor the ceasefire agreed earlier in April that year and, to a limited extent, protect civilians. There are now over 5,000 peacekeepers on the ground, which rose to 7,500 by October 2005.
Although this humanitarian intervention was too little too late for the hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed, it is now providing limited protection for the people of Darfur and facilitating the delivery of aid.
Over a million people, driven from their homes, now face death from starvation and disease as the Sudanese government and militias still attempt to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching them. The same forces have destroyed the people of Darfur's villages and crops, and poisoned their water supplies, and they continue to murder, rape and terrorize.
Last week, negotiations between the warring parties of Sudan's Darfur region over power-sharing arrangements were deadlocked in Abuja, impeding the search for an overall peace deal to end three years of bloodshed, negotiators said last Wednesday.
Two Darfur rebel movements and the Sudanese government were deep into a seventh round of peace talks in Abuja but they have had to put aside two critical power-sharing issues after weeks of detailed talks failed to achieve progress.
"There's no basis for understanding between the parties on these issues. As far as power-sharing is concerned, it's not moving at all," said Ahmed Tugod, chief negotiator for the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).
The other two main areas of negotiation are wealth-sharing and security arrangements, but Tugod said any progress in those areas would be meaningless without agreement on power-sharing.
The JEM and the larger Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) took up arms against the government in early 2003 complaining of marginalisation. Khartoum responded by backing proxy militias to fight the rebels in Darfur, a desert region the size of France.
The violence killed tens of thousands of people and drove more than two million from their homes into refugee camps in Darfur and neighbouring Chad. The International Criminal Court is already investigating alleged war crimes in Darfur.
The AU, which has 6,000 peacekeepers in Darfur and is the main mediator in the talks, said last week Tuesday that a crisis between Sudan and Chad risked damaging the Darfur peace process and called on the neighbours to resolve it immediately.
The dispute flared the December 18, 2005 attack by Chadian rebels on a town on the border with Sudan.
The AU said the parties at the Darfur peace talks had now agreed on 80 per cent of the points under discussion concerning wealth-sharing.
On security arrangements, they were discussing item one of a five-point agenda that took weeks to agree.
But the AU said an attempt to move forward on power-sharing by negotiating in smaller groups, launched last December 23, had failed and the contentious issues had been left in abeyance for now.
The sticking points are the rebels' demand for a new post of vice-president to be created that would be attributed to a representative of Darfur, and for the three states that make up Darfur to merge into one region with an autonomous government.
Government negotiators say the Darfur rebels are trying to replicate a peace agreement reached a year ago by Khartoum and rebels from southern Sudan, who fought a separate, bloodier insurgency that was Africa's longest-running civil war.
The southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), now part of the government, obtained a post of first vice-president and an autonomous regional government under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). Southern Sudan also has the option to hold a referendum on secession six years after the peace deal.
But the government team said the situation of southern Sudan is completely different from that of Darfur, which they say is part of the broader north rather than being a separate region.
"They are trying to simulate the CPA but it is not the right time," said Timothy Chol, a member of the SPLM who is negotiating on power-sharing from the government side.
Chol said the north-south peace deal had established a temporary framework for power-sharing at the national level that should be maintained until elections scheduled to take place in two and a half years. He said the Darfur conflict should be resolved within that framework.
But JEM's Tugod said the government's position on these issues showed Khartoum was not serious about resolving the Darfur conflict through a political solution.
Given the plethora of crises which the Khartoum-based government have had to contend with, analysts wonder if it would not be wrong to hand over the leadership of the AU to Sudan which will automatically become something like a judge in its many cases if it assumes AU chairmanship. Such is the heavy moral burden besetting the AU when it meets in the next few days. How the body faces up to that challenge, observers say, will go a long way towards defining the kind of peace, which the troubled continent will have in the years ahead.
|
advertisement