UN team to visit Darfur to assess ground for planned AU’s peacekeeping force

ADDIS ABABA, Aug 6 (AFP) — A United Nations team helping the African Union (AU) set up a peacekeeping force for Sudan’s Darfur province will visit the troubled area next week to assess the situation, the team’s leader said.

“I have no comments to make (until) we travel to Darfur (in western Sudan) to assess the situation on the ground and then (come) back to Addis Ababa to discuss what we have seen with our AU brothers,” UN military advisor Patrick Cammaert told reporters.

The team, which was sent by UN secretary general Kofi Annan, is due to travel to the Sudanese capital Khartoum Sunday, and by Monday it will be in Darfur, he added.

Cammaert and his team, which arrived in the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa late on Thursday, held talks with the pan-African body’s commission chairman Alpha Oumar Konare on how the UN could help the deployment of the force in resource-rich Darfur.

“Konare told the UN team that he has got little time… to deploy the forces to Darfur as every minute passes the situation in Darfur changes so (there is the) need to be there on time,” AU spokesman Adam Thiam told AFP, after the two sides held closed-door talks.

Konare welcomed “the UN’s help and asked the team to speed up its support as the humanitarian crisis has to be averted before it gets out of control,” Thiam added.

Cammaert and AU officials assessed the body’s current peacekeeping capacity and discussed how to reinforce it, he added.

The team’s visit to Khartoum was announced only days after the Khartoum government agreed to disarm marauding Arab militias, called Janjaweed, accused of a reign of terror in Darfur, as demanded by the UN Security Council in a resolution passed July 30.

The AU said Wednesday it was planning to transform what was supposed to be a small 300-man unit to protect AU observers overseeing a shaky ceasefire in Darfur into a 2,000-strong peacekeeping force, which will have a broader mandate of ensuring that there is security.

Up to 50,000 people have died, according to the UN, and around 1.2 million others displaced since rebels launched an uprising early last year to demand an end to what they see as discrimination against non-Arab ethnic minorities in Darfur.

The Darfur rebellion, which started as a grassroot revolt in February 2003, has spawned what the UN has described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.