Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir
Head of the National Congress Party. He came to power in 1989 when he, as a brigadier in the Sudanese army, led a group of officers in a bloodless military coup that ousted the government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi and eventually appointed himself president. Omar's peculiar talent lies in starting conflict. He has fallen out with his Islamic mentor, Hasan al-Turabi, tried to impose shariah on the Christian and animist south, resulting in its imminent secessesion, and attempted to
ArabizeDarfur by unleashing the barbaric Janjaweed on it. Sudan's potential prosperity has been pissed away in warfare that has left as many as 400,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced. Omar has been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court but nothing is expected to come of it.
and leaders of Chad, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso,
...The country in west Africa that they put where Upper Volta used to be. Its capital is Oogadooga, or something like that. Its president is currently Blaise Compaoré, who took office in 1987 and may be in the process of being chased out now...
Eritrea and Qatar attended the signing of the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur, a fruit of talks sponsored by the African Union,
...a union consisting of 53 African states, most run by dictators of one flavor or another. The only all-African state not in the AU is Morocco. Established in 2002, the AU is the successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which was even less successful...
United Nations
...an international organization whose stated aims of facilitating interational security involve making sure that nobody with live ammo is offended unless it's a civilized country...
and Arab League.
...an organization of Arabic-speaking states with 22 member countries and four observers. The League tries to achieve Arab consensus on issues, which usually leaves them doing nothing but a bit of grimacing and mustache cursing...
The Liberation and Justice Movement is an alliance of rebel splinter factions.
However,
the way to a man's heart remains through his stomach...
the main gangs in Darfur -- the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), and factions of the Sudan Liberation Army headed by Minni Minnawi and Abdelwahid Nur -- were absent and did not sign the agreement.
"This is not a peace agreement. It is just a 'jobs' agreements, offering diplomatic positions for those who sign it, and failing to solve the real problems in Darfur," JEM front man Gibril Adam told Agence La Belle France Presse.
Adam said the fundamental issues of human rights
...which are usually entirely different from personal
liberty...
violations, power and wealth sharing, holding criminals to account and compensation for the conflict-displaced had not been addressed.
Minnawi himself signed a 2006 peace accord with the Khartoum government in Abuja. But it collapsed last December when he fell out with the government, which he accused of failing to implement the accord.
And Nur vowed on July 8, the eve of South Sudan's independence, to topple the Islamic regime in Khartoum and to replace it with a secular state like in the south.
"We are going to liberate north Sudan and create a liberal, secular and democratic state ... equal to south Sudan," he told AFP by telephone.
"It is our mission ... to change this Islamic fundamentalist regime. The war will not be in Darfur, it will be in Khartoum," he said, and called on "all groups in north Sudan" to join his movement and help it to achieve its goal.
Observers say opposition to the center from Sudan's neglected peripheral regions like Darfur may grow in the wake of the secession of South Sudan, which became independent on July 9.
At least 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur and 1.8 million people decamped their homes since the conflict broke out in 2003 between non-Arab rebels and the Arab-dominated Khartoum regime, according to the United Nations.
The government puts the corpse count at 10,000.
Bashir is wanted by the
International Criminal Court... where Milosevich died of old age before being convicted ...
for alleged genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur.
But the Sudanese president continues to travel around the world on visits such as the signing ceremony in the Qatari capital on Thursday, as the ICC depends on the goodwill of states to detain him.