By Peter Fabricius
Foreign Editor
After a break caused by illness, former president Thabo Mbeki is expected to return on Monday to fraught negotiations to try to ensure that Sudan's first democratic elections next month are peaceful and successful.
Mbeki, who heads an African Union panel on Sudan, was forced to cut short his mission last week and return to South Africa.
According to knowledgeable sources, Mbeki experienced a recurrence of an old neck problem. Though the ailment is not severe and although Mbeki was keen to continue, his doctors insisted he return to South Africa for a check-up.
The sources said that as he had missed his last two checkups, they could not give him an all-clear until he returned to South Africa for a check-up.
Continues Below ↓
This had now happened and he was planning to return to Sudan on Monday, the sources said.
However, Mbeki's spokesman, Mukoni Ratshitanga, denied that Mbeki's return to South Africa had anything to do with his health.
It was for another reason which he did not specify.
Mbeki's diplomatic mission appears to be making progress, according to Sudan specialist Alex de Waal.
He said Mbeki's mission had three main objectives.
The first was to convene a summit meeting of political parties at a national level to adopt an electoral code of conduct and a declaration of common commitments (the latter on wider political issues).
"The parties are signing up to the documents but agreement hasn't been reached on the summit meeting, chiefly because the opposition wants to discuss whether the elections should proceed at all, and the (ruling) National Congress Party insists that the premise of the meeting is that the elections should proceed."
De Waal said the second aim of the mission was to convene a summit meeting of political parties in southern Sudan.
"This meeting was held in Juba on March 1-2 and was extremely successful."
De Waal said at that meeting the political parties and independent candidates in southern Sudan had adopted and signed an electoral code of conduct and a declaration of common commitments.
The summit meeting was "remarkable" because it had brought together southern political parties who until recently had been saying their rivals would not be able to run for election.
De Waal said Mbeki had been proceeding slowly on the third leg of his mission, to try to implement his panel's recommendations on solving the Darfur crisis.
One of the most controversial was that Sudan should establish hybrid courts with some international judges to bolster the questionable credibility of its own courts.
Khartoum has rejected this.
-
This article was originally published on page 2 of The Mercury on March 15, 2010
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
