President George Bush and South African President Thabo Mbeki are asking for a stronger international push to make Sudan let the United Nations strengthen a peacekeeping force in the that country’s Darfur region.
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has refused to allow the dispatch of thousands of UN troops to Darfur to boost 7 000 African peacekeepers already there.
Three years of fighting between government-backed militiamen and rebel forces in Darfur have killed more than 200 000 people and forced about 2,5-million from their homes. Some studies put the death toll at 400 000.
In a joint news conference on Friday, Mbeki urged the UN Security Council to increase pressure to get troops into Darfur.
”It’s very urgent, very necessary, and we will absolutely do everything to make sure that from the African side we remove any obstacle there might be to such bigger deployment in Darfur,” Mbeki said.
Bush said they talked of the need for countries to ”work with the Sudanese government to enable a peacekeeping force into that country to facilitate aid and save lives”.
Al-Bashir contends the dispatch of UN forces would amount to neocolonialism.
During a meeting in the White House, the two also discussed issues including World Trade Organisation negotiations, preventing the spread of HIV/Aids and South Africa’s role at the United Nations now that it has been elected to one of the Security Council’s non-permanent seats.
Mbeki said he also discussed with Bush the need to support Somalia’s weak provisional government. The United Nations recently passed a resolution to allow an African peacekeeping force into that Horn of Africa nation and to ease an arms embargo so the force could operate. The resolution is opposed by the Islamic Courts militia, which has taken over almost all of Somalia except the town of Baidoa, where the provisional government is entrenched.
Mbeki said Bush shared his fear that without a strong, unified government, Somalia would continue to pose security threats for the rest of Africa.
”One of the big problems is that as it is, it provides a base for terrorists who find safe haven there and then can spread out to the rest of the continent,” he said. – Sapa-AP