UN council envoys to see Darfur crisis up close

Diplomats from the U.N. Security Council head to Sudan's western Darfur region on Thursday where they hope to see up close the effects one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

On the fifth day of a 10-day tour of African hotspots, the 15-nation council will fly from Khartoum to El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, where the U.N.-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) is based.

The delegations will meet with the wali, or governor, of North Darfur, visit a camp for internally displaced persons and stop by UNAMID headquarters. They will then meet with humanitarian aid workers before returning to Khartoum for evening talks with Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

Experts estimate some 200,000 have died and 2.5 million have been forced from their homes in five years of ethnic and political conflict in Darfur. Khartoum says only 10,000 people have been killed.

Bashir has been under pressure to all a quicker deployment of UNAMID, which is to reach 26,000 troops and police at full strength. There are only around 9,000 UNAMID peacekeepers on the ground in Darfur, a region roughly the size of France.

While deployment has been slow, Khartoum confirmed on Wednesday that Thai and Nepalese battalions could deploy in Darfur once Egyptian and Ethiopian troops had deployed.

"There has been an improvement in the atmosphere for cooperation between the U.N. and the African Union on one side and the Sudanese government on the other," British Ambassador to the United Nations John Sawers told reporters.

"We need to take that forward so an effective force can build up in Darfur. We'll see tomorrow and be able to get a first-hand sense of how that process is going," he said about the council's trip to El Fasher.



HELICOPTERS NEEDED

However, Sawers said the council gave Sudanese officials a list of a dozen improvements needed in Darfur, such as speeding up deployment of UNAMID and improving access for aid workers.

U.N. efforts to end the festering conflict have been complicated by a surprise strike across the desert last month by Darfur's Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).

The attack was only stopped on the outskirts of Khartoum and prompted Sudan to rule out negotiations with the rebels.

Western diplomats and officials have accused Bashir of deliberately slowing deployment of UNAMID and Washington has said the United Nations was also moving too slowly.

U.N. peacekeeping officials say that major U.N. member states have failed to provide helicopters and other essential hardware the UNAMID mission needs in order to be effective.

In meetings in Khartoum and the southern Sudanese city of Juba, the Security Council envoys have been pushing leaders in the north and semi-autonomous south to avert a return to civil war by rescuing an ailing peace agreement from 2005.

Sudan's U.N. envoy said on Wednesday that the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, was trying to wreck the peace process in Darfur with his accusations that senior officials in Sudan's government shared responsibility for atrocities in Darfur.

Sudanese officials said they would not cooperate with the court, prompting French envoy Jean-Maurice Ripert to suggest that Paris might support "further steps" against Khartoum by the council - meaning sanctions. He did not elaborate.