After three years of mass murder in Darfur, the West is in
a hurry for a peace accord to enable UN troops to deploy
Mediators at talks on Darfur are scrambling for a rapid peace deal that would allow United Nations' troops to deploy in the region, where murders and rapes perpetrated by Khartoum's army and its militia allies have risen sharply again in recent months. Pressure is mounting on rebel groups and the regime to agree a peace deal in Nigeria that will trigger the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force in Darfur. The National Islamic Front-National Congress (NIF-NC) regime has angrily refused a UN deployment in Darfur and threatened jihad. It will accept a UN take-over from the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) only after a peace deal and said so at the AU Peace and Security Council meeting in Ethiopia on 10 March, which extended the AMIS mandate until September and agreed 'to consider' handing over to the UN.
Darfur's troubles are fuelled by violence flowing both ways across the Chadian border, some of it orchestrated by the Sudanese regime. Meanwhile, President Idriss Déby Itno clings to...
Oil, China and a bid for votes are driving the world's fastest
growing economy
This week, an International Monetary Fund team is in Luanda to assess Angola's staggering economic boom; the Fund expects gross domestic product to grow by 27.6 per cent...