The Sudanese regime suffered diplomatic humiliation yesterday when the African Union refused to appoint its military dictator as its chairman. The union, which includes all 53 countries on the continent, protested over the bloodshed in Sudan's war-torn region of Darfur by rejecting President Omar al-Bashir's bid to assume its rotating chairmanship. Sudan had been promised this accolade when it hosted a summit of African leaders last year. Had he succeeded, Mr Bashir, who seized power in a coup in 1989 and played host to Osama bin Laden for five years in the 1990s, would have become the most prominent leader in Africa.| Instead, the AU chose to give its chairmanship to President John Kufuor of Ghana, a democratically elected leader who was educated at Exeter College, Oxford. "It looks like sense has prevailed," said one aid official. |
The AU deploys the only outside force in Darfur, where four years of civil war have forced at least two million people to flee their homes and claimed 300,000 lives, either from violence, starvation or disease. The dangers faced by aid workers were driven home when 135,000 refugees in Gereida, forming the largest concentration of displaced people in Darfur, were left without any food aid. The French agency supplying them, Action against Hunger, withdrew from the area after an attack on its compound. A spokesman said one French aid worker was raped and others were subjected to mock executions during the incident last December.
Under the AU's banner, some 5,000 African soldiers and 2,000 civilians are struggling to contain the violence. Had Sudan been given the AU's leadership, it would have taken charge of this mission and become, in effect, responsible for policing itself. But African leaders gathering for their summit in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, feared that promoting Mr Bashir would have destroyed the AU's credibility.
Having been denied the chairmanship, Mr Bashir also had to listen to criticism of his conduct in Darfur from Ban Ki-moon, the new United Nations secretary-general, who addressed the summit. "Together we must work to end the violence and scorched-earth policies adopted by various parties, including militias, as well as the bombings which are still a terrifying feature of life in Darfur," said Mr Ban. By citing "militias", Mr Ban was referring to the notorious "Janjaweed" militias which Mr Bashir's Arab-dominated regime launched against Darfur's black African tribes at the outset of the war.