Gaddafi cautions West on Darfur involvement

Sirte, Libya, Apr 29: Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has urged the international community to stay out of Sudan's Darfur crisis unless the warring parties themselves were willing to implement a solution.

Gaddafi made the remarks yesterday as he welcomed international envoys to Libya for talks on Darfur, where four years of fighting between rebels, government forces and Arab Janjaweed militia have killed at least 2,00,000 people and displaced some 2.5 million, creating one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

''My advice to the world, after this conference and finding solutions to the issue, is to ignore the disputing parties if they don't respond to these solutions,'' Gaddafi told envoys from the United Nations, African Union (AU), United States and a string of Western and African countries.

''I call on (the world) not to finance them materially and to stop supporting them and not to send international forces,'' he added as he received the officials in his hometown of Sirte.

The United States says the Darfur bloodshed amounts to genocide and, backed by Britain, is demanding that Sudan accept a combined AU-UN peacekeeping force of more than 20,000 troops and police or face international sanctions.

But a Western diplomat told Reuters on the eve of the meeting that the talks in Libya would leave aside the peacekeeping issue and focus on seeking a political settlement.

Amid a welter of initiatives on Darfur including from Libya and Eritrea, he said all parties needed to agree to consolidate diplomatic efforts under the aegis of the AU and UN.

''Peacekeeping is not under discussion here. This is to try and bring to life the revival of the political track,'' the diplomat said. ''What we need is a process vigorously led by the AU and the UN''.

Political progress has been made much harder by the fact that the Darfur rebels themselves are split. A peace deal in May last year was signed by only one of three rebel negotiating factions.

In apparent criticism of the rebels, Gaddafi said: ''I see that the rebel side in the region is the one which endeavours to implicate the world in this issue. It is not in the interest of the world to intervene in an issue in which one of the parties doesn't want a solution.'' Gaddafi styles himself as an African nationalist seeking African solutions to the continent's problems without relying on the West.

An overstretched force of some 5,000 AU peacekeepers has so far failed to stop the bloodshed in Darfur, and one of its officers said this week that Arab militias were killing and pillaging there with impunity.

So far Sudan has agreed to a U.N. ''heavy support package'' for the AU troops that includes some 3,500 UN military and police personnel, but it has not accepted the full UN-AU force of more than 20,000 which the UN Security Council first authorised last August.

Britain and the United States have been drawing up a sanctions resolution if Sudan continues to balk at UN demands, although no date has been set for its introduction in the Security Council. Among the measures under consideration are an arms embargo for the entire country.

The Libyan talks, scheduled to end today, bring together special Darfur envoys from the United Nations, African Union, United States, European Union and Britain, and ministers or officials from Sudan, Eritrea, Chad, Egypt, France, Canada, Norway and Russia.

Reuters>