By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive
UNITED NATIONS, June 24 -- With Abyei still smoking and South Kordofan in flames, UN Security Council members met past 8 pm on Friday to hammer out a final draft resolution.
The text, subject to a silence procedure on Saturday and “going blue” on Sunday, should be adopted on Monday, numerous Council members told Inner City Press at the otherwise empty stakeout.
Earlier the UK and France had questioned if 4000 troops would be needed. The UN Department for Peacekeeping Operations gave a briefing, mentioning NATO's 45,000 troops in Kosovo. Manhattan's 10,000 police officers were also mentioned. That concern dropped away.
Delegations from both East and West said human rights concerns were raised, most notably by Germany, which was quoted by the other delegations as arguing that to not include rights monitors would be a bad precedent. Others pointed to the terms of the Addis Ababa agreement between North and South Sudan.
Leaving the Council Friday night, two non-Western delegations told Inner City Press that the agreed text, with a few “bracketed items,” followed the Addis agreement in all important ways. There was an air of collaboration, that this was important and should be passed.
A more cynical or realistic view is that when both the US and China want stability in a place, for economic reasons, the others fall into place.
In a sense the Council's credibility is on the line. They embraced the Addis agreement, when Thabo Mbeki presented it to them on Monday. How could they then modify it so much as to give Khartoum the opportunity to renege and not remove its troops?
“Silence procedure on Saturday, in blue on Sunday and a vote on Monday,” a member told Inner City Press. We'll see.
