UN chief promises renewed push for Darfur negotiations
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon promised to step up efforts to end the four-year-old conflict on his first visit to Darfur today and urged the world to be more sympathetic to the millions of people whose lives have been uprooted.
He said the deployment of a 26,000-strong African Union-UN peacekeeping force in Darfur was now on a “good track” and “it is crucially important that a political negotiation process start now”.
UN and AU envoys have been trying to get eight key rebel groups back to the negotiating table with the Sudanese government and Ban said “we are coming close to agreeing on the venue and date”.
“I’m really going to step up this political negotiation process,” he said on the third day of a trip to Sudan that will also take him to Chad and Libya.
The secretary-general spoke to reporters en route to North Darfur’s capital of El Fasher from Juba in southern Sudan, where he stressed the link between a political solution in Darfur and implementation of a 2005 peace agreement ending the 21-year civil war between Sudan’s Muslim government in the north and mainly Christian and animist rebels in the south.
He was greeted at El Fasher’s airport under extremely tight security by the governor of North Darfur, Mohamed Osman Kibir, before receiving an official welcome at the AU headquarters.
While heading to Darfur, Ban also focused on the difficulties of implementing the 2005 peace agreement between north and south Sudan.
“I came to realize much more than I thought in New York, the importance and urgency of smooth implementation of Comprehensive Peace Agreement,” Ban said.
“It is crucially important that both south and north Sudanese leaders fully cooperate on the basis of mutual trust,” he said.
Asked whether a failure to resolve the Darfur conflict could threaten the north-south peace deal, Ban said: “this is exactly why I say (the) hybrid peacekeeping operation process and the political negotiations process should go hand in hand.”
Ban said earlier he wanted to come to Darfur to meet some of the 2.5 million people forced to flee their homes and to assess upcoming deployment of the AU-UN force, which is not expected to begin until early next year.
Asked whether he hoped to put a human face on his diplomatic efforts during a visit to a camp for the internally displaced, Ban said: “The United Nations and international community should be more sympathetic and try to help… They have been suffering too much.”
