As soon as you're born they make you feel small

Progress towards new Darfur force

Sudan's Foreign Minister Lam Akol has told the BBC that Sudan will accept United Nations peacekeepers for Darfur made up of non-African troops. He said Sudan was close to agreeing to the deployment of the 20,000-strong force under the UN and African Union. But after meeting Sudan's president, France's foreign minister is quoted as saying that President Omar al-Bashir was still resisting non-African troops. The AU and UN have presented their revised peacekeeping plan in which the AU runs day-to-day operations, while the UN is expected to have overall control of the troops at talks in Addis Ababa. The new plan has been created to get round the objections of the Sudanese government, which does not want a solely UN force, which it says would be like a Western invasion of their country. "There are two types of troops: there are troops coming as a result of the light and the heavy packages, and there are troops that are contributed by the African countries," Mr Akol told the BBC. "The one that come from the two packages are entirely UN troops and they are free to bring them from anywhere they want, and this amounts to about 3,000 of them. "The rest of the troops come from the African Union, as has been agreed in Addis Ababa and Abuja." Meanwhile, in a letter dated 4 June to the UN secretary-general, Mr Bashir confirmed his government was busy studying plans for a joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force. He said Khartoum was committed to "disarming all militia in Darfur", but the process so far had been "counterproductive".

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