The Cabinet is to be asked to approve an African Union request to South Africa to send military observers to monitor a ceasefire in Sudan.
Defence spokesperson Sam Mkhwanazi said the AU requested 10 observers from South Africa earlier this month. The request was forwarded by way of the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Presidency.
Mkhwanazi said Minister of Defence Mosiuoa Lekota will soon be taking the request to the Cabinet.
Meanwhile, the South African National Defence Force has identified personnel who could be tasked as military observers should the Cabinet approve.
Lekota earlier this week mooted the deployment of peacekeepers to Sudan, where the AU this week set up a headquarters from where it will monitor a ceasefire between Darfur rebels and Khartoum government troops as well as allied militiamen known as the Janjawi.
The fighting, which started in January last year, has so far claimed about 10 000 lives and rendered more than a million people refugees, mostly inside Sudan but also in neighbouring Chad.
The United Nations has described the conflict as the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis.
Reports say the observer force will muster about 120 and will include teams from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana and Namibia.
South Africa already has peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi and observers in Uganda, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
The ceasefire the AU team is to monitor is separate from a peace deal struck at the weekend ending a long-running civil war between Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army, led by John Garang.
He is currently touring southern Sudan to explain a series of accords he has signed over the past two years with the government to end more than two decades of devastating civil war. — Sapa