PARIS – The world has fallen down on the job of ending the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday as she welcomed the effort that France’s new conservative-led government has put to the cause.
She called the four-year-old conflict “one of the true humanitarian disasters that we face in international politics, and one the international community has simply got to act more quickly and more responsibly to stop.”
The chief U.S. diplomat was in Paris for two days of get-to-know-you meetings with the new French government and a strategy session on Darfur.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner organized a conference today to speed deployment of about 20,000 new peacekeeping troops to Darfur, where an estimated 200,000 people have died in fighting between African rebels and militias backed by the Sudanese government.
Sudan was not invited to the Paris conference, a decision that Kouchner justified Sunday.
“This is not a ‘peacemaking’ meeting, but on the contrary, a meeting to support the international efforts that have been deployed,” he said.
Before arriving Sunday, Rice warned Sudan’s government not to renege on its recent agreement to allow a larger peacekeeping force into Darfur.
“If in fact the Sudanese are prepared to accept the hybrid force, they need to accept it once and for all and stop the process of trying to scale it back,” Rice said in a press conference aboard her plane. “It seems one step forward, two steps back with the Sudanese government.”
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