Rice arrives in Ethiopia for Africa crisis talks

ADDIS ABABA - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Ethiopia on Wednesday for talks with African leaders aimed at tackling long-running conflicts in the volatile Great Lakes region, Somalia and Sudan.

On only her second trip in two years to sub-Saharan Africa, Rice said she wanted to move international efforts forward to resolve those conflicts in a string of meetings with African leaders during her 24-hour trip to Addis Ababa.

"I am increasingly concerned about several crisis spots in Africa," she told reporters travelling with her to the Ethiopian capital, which is also the headquarters of the African Union.

Rice planned to meet leaders from Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda and ministers from Democratic Republic of Congo, to discuss the conflict in the Great Lakes region that brings in all those countries. Congo's President Joseph Kabila could not attend the meeting, said an official travelling with Rice.

Rice's aim is to develop common strategies to deal with what Washington says are "negative forces" including the FDLR (Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda), made up of key figures in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, as well as the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army and renegade Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda.

In meetings with Sudanese officials, Rice said she would seek to prevent a north-south peace deal from unravelling, threatening a return to full scale civil war.

"That is really an agreement that we cannot afford to let unravel because everybody is focused on Darfur, but of course the North-South civil war led to millions of deaths," Rice said.

Rice will also discuss delays in deploying a U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force for Darfur and she reiterated U.S. frustration at hold-ups by the Sudanese government in letting in the peacekeepers to resolve a conflict that the United Nations estimates has claimed about 200,000 lives.

"We have been sceptical all along because we have seen this movie several times before," she added, referring to persistent Sudanese obstacles in allowing in the force.

The schedule for getting 26,000 peacekeepers into Darfur by year-end is months behind and Rice said she had spoken to U.N. Secretary General Ban ki-Moon about the delays. She was also pressing Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which have some influence over Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

Rice will also meet Somalia's new Prime Minister, Nur Hassan Hussein and she said she would appeal to him to be more "inclusive" in pulling together his fragile, new government.

Four Somali cabinet members resigned on Monday, barely 24 hours after being appointed to protest against what they said was their clan's under-representation in the government which is faced with long-standing clan divisions and an Islamist insurgency.

Rice will also meet officials from Ethiopia, which cooperates closely with the United States on counter-terrorism issues.

Tensions have been mounting between Ethiopia and neighbour Eritrea over its disputed border, with Eritrea accusing the United States of siding with Addis Ababa over the issue.

Rice said the border needed to be drawn up in a way that was "sustainable" for both sides. "We don't need a use of force here," she added.