Annan envoy heads to Sudan to push for Darfur force

Dec 18, 2006 (UNITED NATIONS) — U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who leaves office in less than two weeks, is making a last-ditch effort to convince Sudan to accept a much stronger peacekeeping force in Darfur, a U.N. spokesman said on Monday.

Annan is sending a top aide, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, to Khartoum on Wednesday to pin down the government’s position on his proposal to build up the African Union mission already in Darfur with substantial U.N. resources in a proposed “hybrid” force, U.N. chief spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

The U.N. envoy will also bring a message from Annan to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, following up on a weekend telephone conversation between the two men, Dujarric said. Annan steps down on Dec. 31 after 10 years as secretary-general, to be replaced by South Korean Ban Ki-moon.

The United Nations has been trying without much success to persuade Bashir to accept the deployment of as many as 22,500 troops in Darfur, building on the 7,000 African Union troops now in Darfur.

The African Union force is seen as too small, underfunded and ill-equipped to protect civilians and enforce a widely ignored cease-fire in the Western Sudanese region where four years of fighting among rebels, Sudanese forces and pro-government militia has killed more than 200,000 people and driven more than 2.5 million villagers from their homes and into squalid camps.

The Security Council has authorized a much larger force but Bashir has strongly resisted U.N. troops, saying they were driven by colonialism.

Bashir more recently has indicated Khartoum would accept an African Union force financed and supported logistically and otherwise by the United Nations,

But Bashir later wrote Annan a letter the secretary-general termed “a bit ambiguous.” U.N. officials said Bashir wanted a tripartite commission to approve any troops coming into Darfur, which would in effect give Khartoum a veto.

Annan said the United Nations would probably pay for the peacekeeping mission only if it was confident that “we will be able to put on the ground a workable, effective force, that will bring some measure of security.”

Ould-Abdallah is Annan’s special representative for West Africa, but would be sent to Sudan in his capacity as a senior adviser to the secretary-general, Dujarric said.

(Reuters)