UN fails to convince Khartoum to allow Darfur force

Britain's UN Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, shown with Sudan's Foreign Minister Lam Akol (R), denied there would be an intervention force. Picture / Reuters.

KHARTOUM - UN Security Council members have failed to convince Sudan's President of the need for a UN peacekeeping mission in the violent Darfur region, diplomats have said.

Since 2003, at least 200,000 civilians have died in the region through fighting, hunger and disease, and more than 2.5 million people have been driven from their homes.

Representatives of the 15-nation UN Security Council were visiting Sudan to try to convince the Khartoum government the UN did not intend to send an invasion force to the western region or dispatch troops without Sudan's consent.

But one envoy said President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir played "bad cop" at Tuesday's two-hour closed-door meeting.

Others said he argued the African Union (AU), now in Darfur, could do the job by itself, rather than some 10,000 peacekeepers the United Nations is planning to send to help quell the violence.

Sudan's Foreign Ministry spokesman Jamal Ibrahim said the government would take up the issue after the UN and the African Union had completed a military assessment mission this week and discussed their findings with Khartoum.

After that respective political parties would be consulted.

"So I think we are going on in the right direction," Ibrahim said after the council met Foreign Minister Lam Akol, a member of the former rebel Southern Sudan Liberation Movement, considered more sympathetic to the world body than other government members.

The fighting in Darfur escalated in early 2003 between African rebel farmers and Arab tribesmen, at one time armed by the government and blamed for much of the ethnic cleansing but not all of the fighting and mayhem.

Sudan signed a peace agreement with the main Darfur rebel faction on May 5, but two other rebels groups refused to join. The agreement, signed in Arusha, Nigeria, also provided for a more robust mandate for the African Union so it could protect civilians.

Since then efforts have intensified to persuade Khartoum to let the UN take over peacekeeping from 7000 badly equipped and under-funded African Union troops.

Bashir, a general who controls the Sudanese army, at first opposed African Union peacekeepers also but then relented. But so far he has given no sign of agreeing to a UN force, although he consented to the military planning mission.

Bashir argues that a UN force entering under enforcement provisions in Chapter 7 of the UN Charter would have free military rein. Chapter 7 is used for parts of nearly all peacekeeping operations for protecting civilians or for self-defence.

But Britain's UN ambassador, Emyr Jones Parry, leader of the UN delegation, said at a news conference: "There is no question of an intervention force."

According to Jones Parry, Chapter 7 "is not an open ended use of force (and) is not targeted at government but those who want to undermine the (peace) agreement."

To the rebels, he said: "Our message would be we'd like you to sign and if you start impeding the agreement then the Security Council will be watching very carefully indeed."

The Security Council will now visit Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where the head of UN peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guehenno, will consult with African Union officials on their joint military assessment mission.

The council will also visit Darfur, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

- REUTERS