Translated material
Problems due to oil
Sudan refuses UN peacekeepers
Africans are distrustful of UN peacekeepers. Sudan has not given the green light to the deployment of UN blue helmets in its western Darfur province, where a bloody civil conflict has continued since 2003. Instead, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (pictured) yesterday proposed increasing the number of African Union peacekeepers stationed in Darfur since 2004 from 7,000 to 17,000. It is also necessary to extend their mandate, which ends on December 31.The UN headquarters in New York believes that “the African Union will not cope with its tasks on its own.” “We need a qualitatively different operation,” Dmitry Titov, director of the Africa department of the UN peacekeeping department, explained in an interview with Vremya Novostey. According to the UN, from the beginning of 2007 the African peacekeeping mission in Sudan should develop into a large-scale UN operation. In August of this year, the UN Security Council even adopted resolution 1706 on this matter, in which Russia, China and Qatar abstained from voting. Without Sudan's consent, however, such an operation cannot begin.
President Omar al-Bashir explained the day before yesterday evening during a video conference with journalists from Paris, Washington, Moscow and several other capitals why he does not like either the idea itself or the said resolution. In its provisions, the Sudanese leader saw an “infringement of the sovereignty” of his country. "This controversial resolution will take us back to the days of colonization," said Omar al-Bashir, 61, who has ruled the country since 1989. “Don’t we have our own court, our own police?” - he asked rhetorically, since the resolution involves sending to Sudan, in addition to 17 thousand military personnel, also three thousand international police. The President stressed that the rejection of this resolution does not mean Khartoum’s refusal to cooperate with the UN. In his opinion, where international peacekeepers are needed is on the border with Sudan in neighboring troubled Chad, where rebels are attacking a weakening government.
Omar al-Bashir considered the often-heard figure of victims of the conflict in Darfur - 200 thousand people - to be unjustifiably exaggerated by Western sources: “In fact, 9 thousand people died. And all the talk about the worsening situation there is a lie.” The president indirectly blamed the United States for exacerbating this problem, with which the Sudanese government did not have good relations. American companies that previously produced oil in this African country stopped working there due to economic sanctions imposed by the United States against Sudan in 1997. Khartoum, however, managed to establish cooperation with oil companies in India, China and other countries.
President al-Bashir is confident: “Yes, many of Sudan’s problems are due to oil.” Every day the Sudanese mine about half a million barrels of “black gold”.