- The Heads of State from Egypt, Libya, Chad, Nigeria, Sudan, Gabon and Eritrea, meeting yesterday in Tripoli, called for exclusively African peacekeeping troops in Sudan's troubled Darfur region. No mention was made of Sudan's failure to cooperate with the International Criminal Court (ICC), which human rights groups had demanded.
The Libyan capital yesterday hosted a mini summit of the African leaders most engaged in the efforts to bring peace to Sudan's Darfur region. These included Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo, who is also the current head of the African Union (AU), Sudan's ally Libya and foes Eritrea and Chad.
This unlikely group of African countries managed to agree on one key issue; namely that Western countries only should contribute with funds and military equipment to the peace efforts in Darfur, not with troops or political and judicial initiatives. The AU, which currently has 2,400 troops stationed in Darfur, should be the only foreign contigent present there, the leaders held.
The group of state leaders expressed its support to the Libyan leader, Colonel Moammar Gadhafi, regarding his efforts to broker a peace between the Khartoum government, government supported "Arab" militias and the pro-autonomy Darfuri rebel groups. According to Sudan's Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail, a road map for the settlement of the Darfir crisis had been defined and a new round of talks was to start on 1 June in Abuja, the Nigerian capital.
The two main Darfuri militias - the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement - however had chosen to stay away from the mini summit, underlining their limited trust in the group of leaders present in Tripoli. Their trust in the leadership of Libya and Nigeria has become limited after these countries' rejection of a wider role for Western countries and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Indeed, the leaders gathered in Tripoli emphasised on the AU's exclusive military role in Darfur, rejecting in practical terms the offers from several Western countries to send peacekeepers to western Sudan. A "widest possible international participation" in these peacekeeping troops had still been the aim at the April donor conference, where mostly Western countries pledged to donate a total of US$ 3.6 billion for Sudan's reconstruction.
Similarly, AU Secretary-General Alpha Oumar Konaré recently asked the North Atlantic military union NATO to contribute with logistical and financial support for the AU peacekeeping force in Darfur. Also Mr Konaré was only mentioning purely African troops for western Sudan.
Meanwhile, the Tripoli summit appearently failed to address the human rights aspect of the Darfur conflict, where an estimated 10,000 persons have been killed and government supported "Arab" militias are accused of preparing a genocide. Sudanese and international human rights groups had urged the African leaders to cooperate with the ICC, whose prosecutor is now looking into the gravest human rights abuses in African history since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
None of the countries present at the Tripoli mini summit have expressed support for the ICC's investigations. The Khartoum leadership holds that it is capable of doing its own investigations into human rights violations and that it is investigating several cases. The Sudan Organisation Against Torture (SOAT) however claims to have documented ongoing systematic use of arbitrary arrest and torture against civilians believed to support the Darfuri rebels.
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