Wade: Bush warned of troops

2008-07-17 21:13

Dakar - Senegal's president said on Thursday George W Bush told African leaders at one stage the US might send troops to Sudan's Darfur if they did not act to halt what he saw as genocide there.

President Abdoulaye Wade said Bush, who has lobbied strongly for robust international action to end the five-year-old conflict in Darfur, had made the warnings to him, but he did not specify when or in what circumstances.

Commenting on the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor's move this week to seek a war crimes arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Wade said Bush had "always proclaimed loudly and clearly that the US considered Bashir had committed genocide in Darfur".

"I've had to transmit to President Bashir and to my other African colleagues President Bush's warnings that if Africa didn't do anything to end the tragedy in Darfur, the US could bypass the (UN) Security Council and send contingents to Darfur," the Senegalese leader said in a statement issued in Dakar.

Ethnic conflict

"Myself and other African colleagues tried to dissuade him from this and to convince him to leave us to try to sort out this problem among us Africans," he added.

The US has supported the deployment of a joint UN-AU peacekeeping force in Darfur and has even helped to airlift international peacekeepers to and from the violence-torn western Sudanese region.

However, Washington has stopped short of sending its own troops to Darfur, where foreign experts estimate 200 000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes in five years of political and ethnic conflict.

Wade said he had taken Bush's warning to send troops to Darfur "very seriously ... especially since in the case of (the US-led invasion of) Iraq, he'd informed me two days in advance".

The Senegalese leader, who has tried to mediate to help end the fighting in Darfur, said he was aware of the suffering of civilians there and, as a defender of human rights, could not stand by while a crime was being committed.

Worsen the situation

"It's not up to me to defend President Bashir if he is guilty," Wade said in his statement.

Echoing a view taken by the AU this week, Wade said the ICC prosecutor's indictment against Bashir could worsen the situation in Darfur and create "indescribable chaos".

He added he would prefer to see a one-year suspension of any arrest warrant against the Sudanese president, which would allow investigations into his case to continue.

"In law, you are innocent until proven guilty," the octogenarian Senegalese president, a lawyer by training, said.

"Myself and other heads of state in Africa, in co-operation with the AU Commission, will do what is necessary in relation to President Bashir so that all measures can be taken to achieve a just and lasting solution to this crisis," Wade said in his statement, without giving further details.

- Reuters