African leaders to meet in Libya on Darfur conflict
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-10-17 09:08

Five African leaders meet in the Libyan capital on Sunday aiming to spur talks to end a conflict that has displaced about 1.5 million people in Sudan's western Darfur region and created a humanitarian crisis.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who has championed the cause of African unity, invited the leaders of Sudan, Nigeria, Egypt and Chad to the summit.

"The idea is to work on both the (Sudanese) government, as well as the opposition (rebels) ... to soften their positions, to work on them, asking them to moderate whatever stance they take," Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said in Tripoli.

He said the summit aimed to prepare the ground for resuming talks in the Nigerian capital Abuja and to encourage both sides to stick to commitments, including a shaky April ceasefire deal.

Nigeria is the current African Union (AU) president, while Chad and Egypt, like Libya, share a border with Sudan.

AU-sponsored talks in Nigeria between the warring parties are expected to resume on Oct. 21 after collapsing last month with Darfur rebels saying Khartoum had refused key security demands such as disarming marauding Arab militias.

Sudan has accused the United States of encouraging rebels to take a hard line in the negotiations, seen by many as a test of the AU's ability to respond to crises in its own backyard.

The Tripoli summit is expected to take place late on Sunday, after breaking the day's fast during the Muslim month of Ramadan.

Sudanese officials said the summit would support the Nigeria talks and, by including African Arab states, would help ensure the conflict was not misrepresented as an ethnic fight between Arabs and Africans, as some rebels have described it.

Analysts said the gathering's main significance would be to show that regional powers were willing to engage in a crisis that many fear could tear apart a country already coping with a separate war in the south and facing unrest in the east.

"It is important that (regional) powers act on their own national initiative ... and step up to the plate," said Jonathan Stevenson, an analyst at the Washington office of Britain's International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Darfur rebels, who took up arms in 2003, have also been invited to Tripoli to meet Gaddafi, the maverick leader once ostracised by the West but who has been rebuilding ties with Western capitals.

"We think Libya can play a very vital role ... The leader (Gaddafi) wants to listen directly to us so he can take some kind of an initiative," Tag el-Din Bashir Nyam, a member of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement, said in Tripoli.

The rebels, who will not attend the summit, have accused Khartoum of neglecting Darfur and of arming the Arab Janjaweed militia to attack non-Arab villages and kill their inhabitants. Khartoum denies supporting the Janjaweed, calling them outlaws.

The U.N. Security Council has threatened Sudan with possible sanctions if it does not stop the violence, which the United States has described as genocide. The U.N. says the conflict has killed some 50,000 people.

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