Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed el-Bashir and his Chadian counterpart Idriss Deby, after long hours of closed-door meetings, signed late Thursday a new peace deal aimed at ending years of hostility between the two neighboring countries.
The deal, mediated by Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade and signed on the sidelines of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) summit, is the latest effort to achieve peace after Sudan and Chad have repeatedly breached a number of bilateral peace agreements and blamed each other for supporting the neighbor's rebels.
The Dakar Accord reiterated the concerning parties' respect forthose peace deals respectively reached in Tripoli in February 2006,in Khartoum in August 2006, in Cannes in February 2007 and in Riyadh in May 2007.
The deal called on the international community to adopt all necessary measures to set up a peace and security force to guard and observe the joint security operations in the Sudan-Chad border.
A contact group will also be set up, according to the deal, to convene every month to track, monitor and implement the deal.
The accord also pledges to ban all activities of armed groups and to ban the use of the other's territory for destabilization purposes.
Those also present at the signing ceremony were UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, former African Union (AU) Commission Chairman Oumar Konare, Tanzanian President and AU Chairman Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, Gabonese President Hadj Omar BongoOndimba, OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, and representatives from the European Union (EU), the United States and France.
Sudanese Foreign Minister Deng Alor expressed his optimism for a Sudan-Chad peace after the signing ceremony.
"This agreement is going to work," he told reporters. "This is the first time for the OIC to cooperate with the AU and the UN to bring two opposing countries to agreements, (and) this cooperation is very good," he said.
"We hope the summit will bring lasting peace to the African region, which unfortunately has been deeply affected for many years," said Wade, president of the talks' host country, when he first announced his plans to hold mediation talks in Dakar between his Chadian and Sudanese counterparts in a bid to restore peace.
