SUDAN: The African Union (AU) scrambled yesterday to rush troops to Sudan's Darfur region, shrugging off concern that confusion about their exact role could put the peace mission, and possibly lives, at risk.
Officials at the AU's Ethiopian base were phoning around the continent to summon observers and troops to help stop Arab militias from attacking black Africans in Darfur, where the UN says the world's worst humanitarian crisis is unfolding. "This is our first major international operation. We cannot fail," said one official working on the mission, a key test of the AU's stated resolve to police the continent's wars.
But some diplomats worry about the possibility of clashes between an AU force and troops of Sudan, a member-state, which could provoke Khartoum into expelling all AU personnel and lead to the collapse of peace talks with Darfur rebel groups.
US officials have said the Arab militia is conducting ethnic cleansing against black Africans in Darfur, after years of tensions between nomadic Arab tribes and African farmers erupted into armed conflict.
Two groups rebelled last year, accusing Khartoum of neglecting the poor region and arming the Janjaweed, a charge Sudan's Islamist government denies.
More than a million people have fled the fighting.
In three days of diplomatic arm-twisting, African leaders at an AU summit this week persuaded a reluctant Sudan to accept the deployment of 270 AU troops to protect a group of 60 AU ceasefire observers.
The monitors will try to patrol the overcrowded refugee camps and border areas between Sudan and Chad to check violations of a shaky ceasefire signed in April.
But the summit's triumph - it will be the first foreign peace force on Sudanese soil - was rapidly overshadowed by confusion about an effort backed enthusiastically by Senegal in the closing stages of the gathering to expand the troops' role.
The confidential wording of the protection force's current mandate stipulates that it protect only AU observers, western and African officials in Addis Ababa say.
But AU chairman Olusegun Obasanjo and the AU's top civil servant, AU commission chairman Alpha Oumar Konare, both said after the summit closed on Thursday that the protection force could not stand idly by if they saw civilians being attacked. Konare's spokesman maintained that position yesterday.