Africa Union to start Darfur deployment Thursday

ADDIS ABABA, Oct 25 (Reuters) – The African Union said it would start deploying reinforcements for a peace monitoring operation into Sudan’s troubled Darfur region on Thursday.

“We have told the Nigerians that their troops will be deployed on October 28 and the Rwandese on October 30,” AU commissioner for peace and security Said Djinnit told Reuters on Monday.

The Peace and Security Council of the 53-nation AU has agreed to send more than 3,000 extra troops, drawn from Nigeria and Rwanda, to help restore security in Darfur and monitor a faltering truce between rebels and government forces there.

There are currently only 300 AU soldiers in Darfur to protect 150 AU observers monitoring a shaky truce between rebels and government forces in an area the size of France.

Rwanda was scheduled to begin flying troops aboard three U.S. C-130 cargo planes to Darfur on Monday, but said logistical arrangements were insufficient though the troops themselves were ready and willing to depart.

“There is no food and no tents and you don’t just throw soldiers out into the desert to fend for themselves,” said Foreign Minister Charles Murigande.

The hold-up was yet another delay in what critics say has been a slow international response to the crisis in Darfur, where up to 70,000 people have died through malnutrition and disease, and more than 1.5 million have become homeless.

In the first U.S. military deployment in the crisis, three C-130 planes from the Air Force’s 86th Airlift Wing arrived in Kigali at the weekend to ferry troops and cargo.

Up to 1,000 Rwandan troops are expected to reach Darfur in the next two weeks. Nigeria has also promised to send a battalion.

Rwanda was the first country to provide troops for the AU mission, saying it wanted to lead the way after the world did too little to prevent Rwanda’s genocide in 1994, when 800,000 people were killed in three months.