KHARTOUM Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, on a visit to Sudan, urged its leadership on Saturday to preserve the country's unity in the face of what he called a imperialist and Zionist conspiracy to break it up. "Countries of the world such as Europe are uniting, and why should Sudan be breaking up?", Gaddafi said during an address at a public rally in Haj Yousif, a town in the eastern Nile province of Khartoum state.

Sudan has been riven by 16 years of civil war between the government in Khartoum and rebels representing the mainly Christian south in which more than 1.5 million people are thought to have died. Gaddafi said that imperialists and Zionists were seeking the disintegration of Sudan, and imperialists were also creating disumity in many other African countries, and called on the Sudanese people to thwart their plans.

"Why should a Sudanese take up arms against another Sudanese?" Gaddafi said. "Al-Bashir, Al-Mahdi, Al-Mirghani and Garang should be in the same bunker against American missiles on Al-Shifa," Gaddafi said, referring to a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory destroyed by U.S. missiles last year on the grounds that it was allegedly making nerve gas. Former Prime Minister Al-Sadeq al-Mahdi, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Mohamed Osman al-Mirghani and Dr John Garang, leader of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), are the most prominent members of the Eritrean-based opposition National Democratic Alliance (NDA) fighting to topple the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's government.

Gaddafi said several Sudanese leaders had met him in Khartoum and asked him to mediate between the government and the opposition to end the bloodshed in the country. State television said the Libyan leader had met former President Jaafar Mohamed Nimeiri, his former vice-president Abel Alier and Al-Sherif Zein Abdin al-Hindi, a former foreign minister who now heads the second largest political party in Sudan, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). (Reuter)