Bangui, Sudan to revive joint border commission

The government will revive a joint commission set up in 2002 by the Central African Republic (CAR) and Sudan following incidents of violence between rival ethnic groups, a CAR minister said on Thursday. The government-owned Radio Centrafrique quoted the minister of interior and public security, Col Michel Paulin Bondeboli, as saying that the commission would meet soon "to settle definitively all the problems related to the cooperation between the two countries". Bondeboli made the remarks on Wednesday when he received a Sudanese delegation led by Defence Minister Gen Bakri Hassan Saleh. The commission was established on 28 May 2002 to investigate massacres that occurred at Birao, 1,101 km north east of Bangui, the CAR capital, and less than 200 km from the Sudanese border. Other massacres also broke out in the same area in September 2002. Sudan recently appointed a consul to be based at Birao, and the CAR appointed its consul to be based in southern Sudan. "Now there is no insecurity on the border," Khamis Hagar-Azat, a counsellor at the Sudanese embassy in Bangui, told IRIN on Thursday. He said that CAR nationals near the CAR-Sudan were now able to import goods from Sudan and that "movements between the two countries are normal". There was a change of government in the CAR when former army chief of staff Francois Bozize seized power in a coup on 15 March.