African leaders have barely disguised their impatience and disappointment at Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s bad faith and intransigence in dealing with the insurrection in his country’s western region of Darfur.
Their misgivings led them to put off having their summit meeting in Khartoum last July. They moved it to Tripoli, and Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo retained the rotating African Union presidency for an extra six months.
Even though the situation has been aggravated by Sudan moving to the brink of war with western neighbour Chad, African leaders will gather in Khartoum next week for their now biannual summit.
There is no indication that al-Bashir will not be handed the baton by Obasanjo.
There have been howls of rage by the Darfur rebel movements whose Nigerian-sponsored talks with the Khartoum government have been badly bogged down. The rebels want to secure a vice president post to represent them in Khartoum in the same way as their southern counterparts have.
The government’s best offer is for the appointment of a special adviser on Darfur to al-Bashir.
Khalil Ibrahim Mohamed, president of the rebel group, Justice and Equality Movement, is concerned that allowing Sudan to host the AU summit and handing al-Bashir the presidency will affect the impartiality of the 7 700 AU peacekeepers in Darfur.
In October, the AU forces suffered their first casualties with the death of three Nigerian soldiers. Four Sene-galese troops were wounded in November.
Last Friday, a Senegalese peacekeeper was killed in an ambush. The AU has condemned these attacks and the Khartoum government is blaming Chad, whom it accuses of backing the rebels.
Al-Bashir’s credibility regarding Darfur is abysmal. His government has openly backed the Janjaweed militia against the rebels in what is widely regarded as the world’s worst man-made humanitarian crisis. More than 200 000 people have been killed and 3,5million displaced. Many of these have fled to Chad to escape the killing, raping and pillage by the militia.
The Khartoum government says it cannot control the Janjaweed, but African mediators who have dealt with the matter are adamant there is no will to do this.
A United Nations commission stopped short of calling events in Darfur genocide. However, the UN Security Council has endorsed a recom-mendation by the High Commissioner for Human Rights that the behaviour of the Khartoum government in Darfur be referred to the International Criminal Court.
Human Rights Watch is of the view that giving al-Bashir the AU presidency will be ”rewarding the sponsors of crimes against humanity”.
While it might not be able to avoid doing this, the Khartoum summit can hardly sidestep discussion on the Darfur conflict.
The AU force there is seriously under-funded. Last year, the international community provided $330million of the $465million required for the operation.
There is some pressure, most importantly from the United States, to swap the AU peacekeeping berets for sky-blue UN helmets.
This was done successfully in Burundi, where Africans did the job but the world body picked up the tab.
However, UN involvement has thus far been anathema for al-Bashir.
Eritrea and Ethiopia is the other hot-button issue when African leaders get around to discussing conflict on the continent. Tension in the Badme region has been eased with the withdrawal of a number of Ethio-pian troops. But Prime Minister Meles Zenawi does not seem inclined to go the whole nine yards by withdrawing his forces from the town the UN border commission has said belongs to Eritrea. Eritrea has done its own cause no good by expelling Western peacekeepers patrolling the border.
Leaders will hear encouraging reports from: the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 85% of voters endorsed the new Constitution that paves the way for elections by June this year; Burundi, where UN peacekeepers are moving out of the country now run by democratically elected President Pierre Nkurunziza; and Sierra Leone, where the UN peacekeepers have also signed off on their job.
Zimbabwe will try to avoid debate on a stinging report by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights condemning human rights violations in that country.
Harare exhausted all conceivable stalling ammunition on a previous critical report from the commission in 2002.