SUDAN:President Nicolas Sarkozy attempted to inject a sense of urgency into the Darfur crisis yesterday when he received participants in a one-day international conference at the Élysée Palace.
"Tens of thousands of human beings are dying in that part of the world, and we cannot leave the situation as it is," the French president said. "Silence kills, and we want to mobilise the international community to say, 'That's enough'."
French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, who organised the conference, built his career on humanitarian intervention as a medical doctor. "For local populations in despair and total deprivation, our meeting, and your presence, embody a burning hope: the hope that they will soon see an end to their suffering," Dr Kouchner said.
However, he admitted that "the aim is not to launch a new initiative", but was rather "an opportunity for dialogue".
The presence of US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, the German foreign minister, the EU representative for foreign policy and the EU commissioner for humanitarian aid was meant to convey that the "international community" is at last taking the Darfur crisis seriously, four years and four months after it started.
Between 200,000 and 300,000 people have been killed in the conflict, and another 2.5 million people have been displaced, many of them to camps in eastern Chad.
The rebels who started the war have splintered into more than a dozen groups who, like the Janjaweed militias raised by the Khartoum government, terrorise refugees and humanitarian aid workers alike.
Doubtless the most important breakthrough at yesterday's conference was the presence of the Chinese deputy foreign minister. Beijing has until now supported Khartoum.
China buys 65 per cent of Khartoum's oil production, and sells weapons to the same government against which the US has unilaterally imposed sanctions.
Dr Kouchner has said the conflict is about petrol resources, but it is far more complex. It is often described as pitting Arabs against non-Arabs, but that too is a simplification. Experts say it is primarily a struggle between predominantly Arab nomads, who drive their camels and cattle across Darfur, and mainly non-Arab, sedentary farmers.
With 13,000 humanitarian aid workers, Darfur is the biggest humanitarian operation in the world. Sixty-nine aid workers have been kidnapped and released this year.
The 7,000-strong African Mission in Sudan (Amis) has been unable to stop the rape, pillage and murder that have characterised the conflict. One problem, as Dr Kouchner noted yesterday, is that members of the African Union's force are not paid.
For the past 10 months, the UN has demanded deployment of a "hybrid force" combining Amis with UN peacekeepers. The "hybrid force" was finally accepted by Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir on June 12th, but plans for its deployment remain vague.
Yesterday's conference expressed support for the "road map" agreed by the UN and the African Union on June 8th.
Participants said they reached "consensus" on the objectives of the road map: "progress on the political track, accompanied by an end to widespread violence and insecurity, a strengthened ceasefire supported by an effective peacekeeping force, as well as an improvement in the humanitarian situation and serious prospects for socio-economic recovery in Darfur".
The African Union refused to send a representative to yesterday's conference, claiming it had not been consulted in the planning.
"We are not trying to solve things in the place of Africans," Mr Sarkozy said. "Africa is above all the problem of the Africans."
Dr Kouchner said Sudan was not invited because the meeting was "not a peace conference".
Negotiations between antagonists are scheduled to take place in August.