Mohammed Qassim, director of the Sudan affairs department at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, earlier this week told the Arab Affairs Committee at the Egyptian Parliament that the conference will be held in the first half of 2010, while invitations will be sent to international organizations as well as probable donor countries in the coming days.
The United Nations estimates about 300,000 people have been killed since mostly non-Arab rebels in Sudan’s Darfur region took up arms against Khartoum more than six years ago. The government puts the death toll at about 10,000.
The International Criminal Court has demanded President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s arrest for war crimes linked to the counter-insurgency campaign.
A peace process mediated by the United Nations and African Union began last month in Qatar with civil society groups taking part. The fighting has driven more than 2 million people from their homes and destabilized the remote region bordering Chad and the Central African Republic, who are both fighting uprisings fuelled by the unrest in Darfur.
Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently dismissed accusations of genocide against al-Bashir, saying in controversial remarks that a Muslim cannot commit genocide and that “what happened in Gaza was worse than what happened in Darfur.”
