Security Council to hold special Sudan session in Nairobi

ABUJA, Oct 23 (AFP) — The UN Security Council is to travel to Kenya next month to hold a special session on two regional crises in war-torn Sudan, the senior UN envoy to Sudan said today at Darfur peace talks.

The three-day meeting in Nairobi will start on November 18 and mark only the second time that the council has met in Africa, underlining the importance attached to the issue by the international community, said Jan Pronk, a special representative of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

“It wants to give a boost to the progress in the negotiations both of the north-south issue…and on the Darfur issue,” he told AFP.

Sudan is trying to resolve two regional conflicts, one in the south of the country, in which its forces have fought the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, and one in the western province of Darfur, where the government faces the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Movement.

“Maybe it is possible to have talks with them and to get a final spiritual boost to understand how the issue is being felt by the international community,” Mr Pronk added.

Earlier, the UN envoy had warned delegates to the African Union’s peace conference on Darfur that the Security Council would not tolerate further attacks on civilians in a region where 70,000 people have been killed in civil conflict over the past 20 months.