Norway plans to send 200 troops to Sudan with UN

Dec 16, 2005 (OSLO) — Norway is preparing to send up to 200 soldiers to Sudan as U.N. peacekeepers, a senior Defence Ministry official said on Friday, the day after the Scandinavian country’s last soldier left Iraq.

A Labour led coalition took power in Norway in October and said it would withdraw soldiers from Iraq but increase its military work under the United Nations.

“The new government feels it inherited a policy of low visibility in the United Nations and it wants to change that,” State Secretary for Defence Espen Eide told Reuters.

He also said the government wanted to concentrate on Africa, where it already has a handful of soldiers and observers.

More than 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers are being deployed to Sudan’s south to preserve a peace deal signed in January to end more than two decades of civil war there. The forces include Indian, Bangladeshi and Nepalese soldiers.

A second conflict, in Darfur in the west of the country, began in February 2003 and the United Nations wants to extend its mandate and take over from a 6,000-strong African Union force monitoring a ceasefire there.

The cabinet is likely to vote on the deployment in the first quarter of 2006 and the troops would be sent soon after, Eide said.

Norway did not back the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq but had around 20 officers in the country with NATO before the pullout.

(Reuters)