Libya and Sudan will figure high in the sideline talks of the African Union summit, reports Dina Ezzat In Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, the African Union (AU) summit will open next Thursday. During the coming days, however, senior African officials and foreign ministers will be preparing for the summit which is focussed on the empowerment of youth. This said, the files of Sudan and Libya are expected to figure high both in the official AU meetings and in the many unofficial talks, according to delegates who are expected to take part in the meeting. With the upcoming separation of Sudan into two states on 9 July and with the unending confrontation between the forces of the Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi and his opposition -- who are supported by NATO strikes -- developments in Libya and Sudan are the subject of resolutions to be adopted by the summit. The general line of the resolution on Sudan would be a call for maximum efforts of the parties in the north and south of Sudan to achieve peace and stability following separation, and for the international community to lend its support through development projects to the peoples of the north and the south -- with an expected special reference to South Sudan. "No surprises will come out in the official statements on Sudan," said a delegate. However, according to diplomats involved in the Sudan file, the sidelines of the Malabo meeting would be the scene of some considerable talk. A clear message would be offered from representatives of the international community taking part in the Malabo summit, according to one Western diplomat, to both the delegations of the north and the south of Sudan: a peaceful separation should be followed by concerted negotiations to settle the pending issues of the demarcation, the sharing of oil revenues, and citizenship rights. A settlement on the north-south border zone of oil-rich Abyei would also be stressed. And despite the fact that Omar Al-Bashir, the soon to be North Sudan president, withdrew his force from the disputed area, the world, say Western diplomats, is still anticipating assurances that Abyei will not be the trigger of an armed conflict between the north and south. For his part, Al-Bashir is anticipating the assurances of the representatives of the leading Western countries for development aid and personal immunity. Al-Bashir knows that once the South is independent he would lose a good part of the revenues from oil, and is looking for promises of financial support and development projects. "This is the only way he could face up to an anticipated firm political opposition from the north," according to a Khartoum-based foreign diplomat. "Today Al-Bashir is not worried about the south; it is over. He is rather worried about keeping hold of his rule in the north in the face of serious economic challenges that are making life very hard for the average Sudanese and in the face of the political opposition who, from the Islamists to the leftists, are holding his policies responsible for the separation of the south and the crisis in Darfur that is still persisting," said the diplomat. In Malabo, some clear messages would be delivered to Al-Bashir's regime about the need to end all violations of human rights in Darfur. And according to several Western diplomat, if Al-Bashir wants the International Criminal Court case, accusing him of crimes against humanity in Darfur, to be deferred by virtue of Article 16 of the ICC Rome Statute, then he needs to improve human rights in Darfur and to cooperate with fact-finding missions. Western diplomats say that the door is not completely blocked to applying Article 16 to serve the purposes of peace and security in the region. Several Western capitals, according to their diplomats, are coming to acknowledge that with the upcoming separation of the south of Sudan, the changes in Egypt and the turmoil in Libya, maintaining regional stability might require fewer rather than more changes, including one in the ruling regime in Khartoum. The situation in Libya will also figure high in the Malabo summit with delegates anticipating a confrontation between the many African states with close financial associations with Gaddafi and those with close Western, especially US, alliances. The UN Security Council-licensed operations to target Gaddafi troops to protect the civilian population would likely be condemned by several African Union members as interference in African affairs. However, according to informed sources, it is unlikely that there would be consensus on the demand of some to issue a condemnation of the NATO operations. And on the sidelines, the working paper that was issued on Sunday by the Cairo Group in Libya, bringing together the African Union, the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Conference, the European Union and the UN, would be used as a basis for a plan that requires the introduction of humanitarian pauses to provide relief and a ceasefire to be monitored by the UN, and to be coupled with a political process that would effectively end the Gaddafi rule and replace it with a collective rule for a transitional phase pending the democratisation of Libya after four decades of Gaddafi dictatorship. Having expressed its "concern regarding the continued suffering of the Libyan people and the necessity of reaching a political solution", the Cairo Group meeting -- the third since this process started a couple of months ago -- said that its proposed political solution "would be based on achieving a credible and monitored ceasefire linked to a political process, through a transitional period which will enable the Libyan people to achieve their democratic aspirations and legitimate demands". This paper has the support of Arab, European and Islamic countries more than it does of some African countries. "It is hard to expect that some of the African countries who receive direct financial assistance from Gaddafi would be willing to support anything to which he is opposed, but it is becoming clearer and clearer that Gaddafi has no way of ruling Libya again and therefore maybe more African countries would want to work with the findings of the Cairo Group proposal," according to a Western diplomat who took part in the Cairo meeting. The delegation of South Africa, whose president Jacob Zuma enjoys close relations with both Gaddafi and Western leaders, is expected, according to one African diplomat, to be influential in achieving the basic requirements for a deal that many hope could start being executed on the ground with the commencement of Ramadan (2 August) given the inclination of NATO to suspend its operations during the holy Muslim month. An Arab senior diplomat who took part in both the Cairo Group meeting and an earlier meeting that took place in Abu Dhabi for the Libya Working Group said that an Arab demand in this respect has been proposed and that the NATO states tend to agree with a full suspension of the operations, provided that Gaddafi does not try to abuse this suspension to escalate his attacks on civilians. "We are not sure if Gaddafi will survive that long but we don't know for sure," assessed a Benghazi-based Western diplomat.
