Session on Darfur ends without action plan

PARIS -- An international meeting on Darfur ended yesterday with promises to support peacekeeping efforts and a political process to stop the violence in western Sudan, but with few concrete steps.

The nations at the conference, which included major aid donors, the Group of Eight industrialized nations, and Sudan's ally China, offered few details of how they hope to end a conflict that has dragged on for more than four years.

France had said the meeting was aimed at backing a UN-African Union peacemaking effort, offering political support to those trying to bring together splintered rebel groups, and providing funds for a hybrid UN-AU force due to take over from 7,000 beleaguered AU peacekeepers.

Sudan itself was not invited, and the African Union declined to send a delegation.

"We really must redouble our efforts, and I think that that was the spirit of today's conference," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters.

She said Sudan must live up to its vow to accept the hybrid force of 20,000 United Nations and African Union peacekeepers, and accused the government in Khartoum of repeatedly breaking promises to end the violence.

Rice also said Sudan must face consequences -- code for new UN sanctions -- if it fails to allow the force in.

The aim of the new force is to stop the violence in Darfur, where international aid groups believe more than 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been expelled from their homes in more than four years of strife. Sudan says 9,000 people have died.

Bernard Kouchner, France's foreign minister, who convened the conference, stressed the importance of finding a political solution, and backed a UN-AU initiative that aims to have all parties to the dispute ready to begin talks around August.

China, which buys oil from Sudan and has been loath to press it in public over Darfur, said Khartoum is ready to take part.

"I met with [President Omar Hassan] al-Bashir in Sudan. He told me that the Sudanese government actually is ready to come to the negotiating table, at any time, in any place," Liu Guijin, China's special envoy, told reporters.

Despite the absence of specific action from the meeting, a UN special envoy, Jan Eliasson, said it had been useful.

"There has been a long period now of sometimes competing initiatives. Now there was general agreement that we should have a convergence of initiatives," he told reporters.

The Darfur problem dates to early 2003, when non-Arab rebels took up arms, accusing the government of ignoring their plight in the remote, arid region. Sudan mobilized Arab militias to quell the revolt.