Washington – President Bush on Monday called for the United Nations to take over peacekeeping in the Darfur region of Sudan and promised to expedite food aid. He welcomed a proposed peace accord as “the beginnings of hope” for Darfur’s poverty-stricken population.
Bush said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would go to the United Nations today to press for a new U.N. resolution to increase peacekeepers.
He also urged Congress to act on a request for $225 million in emergency food aid for Darfur and said he was ordering the emergency purchase of 40,000 metric tons of food and dispatching five ships to carry it to the region.
The $225 million requested in March is in addition to $215 million already contributed to the World Food Program, said Randall Tobias, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“The rest of the world should step up,” Tobias said.
The second-largest contributor, he said, was Libya, which donated $4.5 million for food, followed by Canada, at $3 million.
Despite a precarious security situation, about 85 percent of the food gets through to the people who need it, and the other 15 percent is held in reserve until it can be delivered, Tobias said.
Bush called Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, seeking his support for a large U.N. peacekeeping force, but did not get a firm commitment, Cindy Courville, Bush’s special adviser on Darfur, told reporters in a telephone interview.
The aim is to nearly double the 7,200 African Union peacekeepers on the ground in Darfur and put the expanded force under U.N. control.
In New York, John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the Security Council would meet today on Darfur.
Bolton said the United States was circulating a proposed resolution that would extend the U.N. peacekeeping in southern Sudan to the western Darfur region.
That 10,000-strong force is monitoring a January 2005 peace accord that ended a 21-year civil war between the Sudanese government and southern rebels that cost millions of lives.
The agreement signed Friday was between the government and the main rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Army. Two smaller rebel groups have refused to sign.
The accord could help end a conflict that has killed about 200,000 people in three years and displaced about 2 million.
