US presidential candidate, UN chief discusses Darfur
Feb 7, 2007 (UNITED NATIONS) — US presidential candidate and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson said he had a “very good, productive” meeting with UN chief Ban Ki-Moon on Sudan’s Darfur crisis and on North Korea’s nuclear program.
He told reporters that he briefed Ban on his trip to Darfur and his talks with Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir last month.
Richardson, who last month also took a first step toward a run for the White House in hope of becoming the first US Hispanic president, visited Sudan at the request of the Save Darfur Coalition, an alliance of more than 170 US faith-based and humanitarian groups campaigning for an end to the carnage in the western Sudanese region.
“I had a very good productive meeting” with the UN secretary general on Darfur and North Korea, he said after the 30-minute encounter.
Richardson said the United Nations, particularly its special envoy to Darfur Jan Eliasson, was “the most important entity” in efforts to bring peace to the strife-torn region and ease a “humanitarian crisis of major proportion”.
“The UN must be involved,” he said while calling for international pressure to secure the deployment of a robust joint African Union-UN force in Darfur to takeover peacekeeping from 7,000 ill-equipped African troops.
On North Korea, Richardson, who like Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister, has had long experience dealing with Pyongyang’s controversial nuclear program, said: “My sense is that the next round of six-party talks …(is) moving in the right direction.”
The talks — involving the United States, China, Japan, the two Koreas and Russia, — are to begin in Beijing Thursday.
In Tokyo, US negotiator Christopher Hill said he hoped the Beijing talks would lead to concrete steps to implement a September 2005 deal under which Pyongyang agreed to scrap its nuclear weapons in exchange for energy and economic aid.
The six-way talks failed to prevent North Korea from conducting its first atomic test in October last year, and the United States has since engaged in unusually direct diplomacy with the Stalinist nation to convince it to disarm.
Richardson served as US ambassador to the UN and as energy secretary under president Bill Clinton.
Last year, he successfully negotiated with Beshir the release of Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Salopek, who was being held in a Sudanese prison on espionage charges.
(AFP)