US Rice to visit Sudan

WASHINGTON, July 15 (AFP) — US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to Sudan next week for her first trip to the troubled African country since taking over as chief US diplomat, a US official said Friday.

The State Department official, who asked not to be named, said Rice would leave Tuesday on a trip that would also take her to Senegal for an African economic conference.

She was also expected to go to the Middle East for talks with Israelis and Palestinians on Israel’s plans to withdraw from Gaza and parts of the West Bank next month, he said.

The official did not specifically say whether Rice would go to Sudan’s war-ravaged western region of Darfur, where her deputy Robert Zoellick has just made his third trip in four months.

The United States has described the bloodshed in Darfur as genocide. Zoellick said in Khartoum on Saturday the situation was still “very terrible” and called on the government there to do boost security and access to relief aid.

Fighting has raged in Darfur since February 2003, when local groups launched a rebellion in the name of the region’s black African tribes against marginalization by Khartoum’s Arab-dominated government.

The Darfur conflict has claimed between 180,000 and 300,000 lives, with some 2.4 million civilians displaced from their homes, while an additional 200,000 have fled into neighbouring Chad.

In Senegal, Rice will attend the US-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum, dubbed the AGOA Forum after American legislation to grant preferential trade terms to nearly 40 developing countries.