NDJAMENA: Leaders from the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD) resumed summit talks on Friday morning behind closed doors in Chad’s capital Ndjamena.
The 13 heads of state who attended the official opening ceremony on Thursday evening were all present on Friday, an AFP journalist saw.
They included Chad’s President Idriss Deby Itno and Sudan’s Omar Al-Bashir, whose regimes are making efforts to improve their relations after five years of conflict.
Bashir’s presence in Chad caused an outcry among human rights groups and led to statements from the European Union and the United States urging Chadian authorities to arrest the Sudanese leader, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague.
Chad is a country that has ratified the founding Rome Statute of the ICC, which has no police and relies on states that support it to carry out arrest warrants.
Ndjamena has resisted considerable pressure to arrest Bashir, who was traveling for the first time to a state that has ratified the Rome accord.
The ICC in March last year accused Bashir of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, and issued a further arrest mandate for genocide earlier this month.
The seven-year Darfur conflict in western Sudan, on the border with Chad, has claimed 300,000 lives according to the United Nations, but the Khartoum government puts the toll at 10,000.
At the opening of the summit, CEN-SAD Secretary General Mohamed Al-Madani Al-Azhari, a Libyan, expressed the unfailing support of the organization for Beshir in the face of the ICC.
"Darfur continues to be a source of concern. CEN-SAD refutes all accusations against President Bashir," Al-Azhari said. "These accusations do not contribute to bringing peace to this part of Sudan."
"We declare our total support and our solidarity to Sudan and its people," he added, speaking to an audience that included 13 heads of state including Beshir.
Earlier this month, the International Criminal Court (ICC) added three genocide counts to the charges against Omar Al-Beshir.
In March last year, the ICC issued a warrant for Beshir’s arrest on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, its first ever for a sitting head of state.
The United Nations says up to 300,000 people have died since conflict broke out in Darfur in 2003, when ethnic minority rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated regime for a greater share of resources and power.
Sudan’s government says 10,000 have been killed.
Beshir rejects the jurisdiction of the ICC and has refused to hand over two key allies wanted for crimes in Darfur.
Chad is the first country he has visited since the warrants were issued and, as a signatory of the ICC’s founding Rome Statute, is obliged to arrest any person on its territory wanted by the court.
Chad, however, has insisted it will not arrest the Sudanese leader, with whom it is engaged in a bid to repair deeply strained diplomatic ties after years of proxy warfare.
