By IRNA
Dakar : The presidents of Sudan and Chad signed a peace deal to suppress armed groups operating along their shared border.
The peace deal will be effective in the battered Darfur region of Sudan where both governments have claimed rebels are backed by the other.
Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir and Chad’s Idriss Deby, commits the two nations to implementing past accords that have so far failed to help end violence in the area.
It calls for the establishment of a monitoring group of foreign ministers from each country that would meet monthly to be sure there are no violations.
“We hope that this accord will open a new page in the relations between the two countries,” Sudanese President al-Bashir told reporters after the signing in Senegal’s capital, Dakar.
If successful, though, it would only be a small step toward ending violence in Sudan’s Darfur region.
The two countries have signed a series of previous deals in recent years – Tripoli and Khartoum in 2006, Cannes and Riyadh in 2007.
Chadian Deby said this deal is different in that it puts concrete implementation to earlier promises, was witnessed by a host of high-level international diplomats and fellow African heads of state and because the will for peace is finally there.
“This one is the best,” Deby said of the deal.
“The guarantee is the belief in peace. The peace needs to be a peace in our hearts.”
A text of the deal said the two leaders agreed to inhibit all activities of armed groups and prevent the use of our respective territories for the destabilization of one or the other of our states.
The deal was brokered by Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade.
Senegal is hosting a summit of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, the world’s largest organization after the United Nations, in Dakar.
The deal proposed by Senegal would have aimed to commit them to implementing earlier, faltered, accords in a step toward calming Darfur and other areas on their shared border.