Sudan agrees to 3,500 extra AU troops: AU source

By David Mageria

NAIROBI, Oct 1 (Reuters) – Sudan has agreed in principle to an African Union (AU) proposal to deploy a force of more than 3,000 troops to stop atrocities in the troubled Darfur region, the pan-African body said on Friday.

The AU since Thursday has been meeting with a high-level delegation from Khartoum to discuss the AU’s peacekeeping operations in Darfur, said Said Djinnit, the AU’s peace and security commissioner.

“We received a formal message that the government agrees on the strengthening of the mission in Sudan,” Djinnit told Reuters by phone from Addis Ababa.

Mutris Siddiq, undersecretary at Sudan’s Foreign Ministry, said a government delegation was in Addis Ababa on Friday with “a mandate to negotiate the details”.

“We had agreed in principle with the AU that they can increase monitors and the protection force,” Siddiq told Reuters from Khartoum.

The strengthening will involve additional protection forces, observers and police, Djinnit said.

“The numbers are still under discussion. We have a proposal of 3,500 but it could increase or be reduced,” he said.

The AU’s peace and security council is expected to decide on the final number of troops by mid-October.

The AU has 300 troops already on the ground in Darfur, tasked only with protecting the roughly 80 observers monitoring a truce between Khartoum and two rebel groups.

AU chairman, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo at the United Nations last week asked international donors for $200 million or help with transport and logistics to back a force of between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers from five African nations.

Violence in Darfur has killed 50,000 people in the last 19 months and has displaced some 1.5 million civilians, in a humanitarian crisis the U.N. calls the world’s worst and the United States calls genocide. (Additional reporting by Edmund Blair in Cairo and Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa)