UN Council members promise not to neglect Africa

UNITED NATIONS - France offered to send a warship off the coast of Somalia, the United States warned Sudan to honor a cease-fire and Belgium advocated withholding aid from nations that exploited child soldiers.

But African delegates cautioned U.N. Security Council members at a summit on Africa called by France on Tuesday that they, not the West, needed to set their own agenda and too many promises had gone by the wayside.

"Africa's agenda will increasingly be defined by the African Union," said AU chairman Alpha Oumar Konare. "We hope to move beyond words, to move beyond promises because too many promises have already been made to Africa."

The unusual session on cooperation with Africa, chaired by French President Nicholas Sarkozy, came several hours after the 15-member body authorized the European Union to send soldiers to Chad and the Central Africa Republic to protect civilians from violence spilling over from neighboring Darfur.

President John Agyekum Kufour of Ghana said warfare in Somalia was being neglected in favor of the strife in Sudan's Darfur region, where help for an African force "has been inadequate and slow in coming."

In response, Sarkozy said France had decided to help counter piracy off Somalia's coast by sending a warship to protect supplies from the World Food Program.

"I call on all those who wish to do so to join this initiative," Sarkozy said.

President George W. Bush as well as Sarkozy called for quick deployment of a planned United Nations-African Union force to Darfur to bolster the 7,000 African troops there.

"We call on all parties to cease arm sales to the combatants," Bush said. "We expect people gathered around this table to send a focused message that innocent life matters."

DARFUR 'GENOCIDE'

"We expect President (Omar Hassan) Bashir to observe a cease-fire during next month's peace talks, and we want the rebels to do the same," Bush said.

He alone emphasized that the United States considered the deaths of tens of thousands in Darfur "genocide."

"When we find genocide it's time to do something about it," Bush said. "Time is of the essence."

Britain's minister of state in the Foreign Office, Kim Howells, touched on Sudan and the African Union's rejection of non-African troops for the new Darfur force.

"I hope the U.N. and A.U. will agree on the (force's) composition so deployment can get back on schedule," Howell said. "Sudan must do all it can to speed up the process. "

He also said the United Nations should be engaged to find a way forward in Zimbabwe because "three million refugees have already fled, threatening instability across Zimbabwe's borders."

But South African President Thabo Mbeki, who has been trying to find a political solution in Zimbabwe without U.N. involvement, did not mention the crisis in his address.

Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, using the example of the Uganda's brutal rebel Lord's Resistance Army, said the world should embargo development aid and exports of weapons to countries with child soldiers.

Saying Joseph Kony, head of the LRA, had been responsible for kidnapping and abusing 70,000 children, Verhofstadt said he still had not been arrested and was operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and southern Sudan.

"The time for talking is over. We know what Kony has done," "We know where he is," he said, "Let's arrest him, put him on trial, make him an example to all children."

Africa, he said, had 300,000 child soldiers, each with a personal horror story that was "a stain on the soul of humanity."