The UN secretary-general said he is "confident" that Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy will play a leadership role in getting all rebel movements to the negotiating table for a new round of peace talks to end the four-year conflict in Darfur.
Ban Ki-moon met with Khadafy in his hometown of Sirte two days after the UN chief and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir announced the talks would be held in Libya starting October 27.
"I asked him and urged him to demonstrate all possible leadership and initiative and influence to bring all representatives of the movements" to the peace table, Ban told journalists on Saturday, "and he said he would do all (he could) to bring them all to the negotiating table."
Asked whether he thought Khadafy was capable of playing a leadership role, Ban replied, "I am confident." Khadafy did not speak to reporters, and Ban said it was not the right time to provide details on the specific actions he is contemplating.
Ban, who has made Darfur a top priority since taking the reins of the UN on January 1, said he told Khadafy that the upcoming negotiations should produce a final settlement. The Libyan leader "expressed his support that we need to work to make this a final phase - and a final settlement of this issue," the secretary-general said.
UN envoy Jan Eliasson said a final settlement would mean agreement on wealth-sharing, power-sharing and security issues.
But producing a settlement requires all key players, and one of the major rebel leaders, Abdel Wahid Nur, said this week he would not attend because his group wants the killings in Darfur to stop before any negotiations begin.
Nur, who leads a major faction of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement group, boycotted talks in early August for the same reason that were aimed at getting Darfur's splintered rebel groups to agree on an agenda for peace talks.
Libya shares a border with Sudan, and Treiki said Darfur's security "is very important to us." As a member of both the Arab League and the African Union, Libya could be a bridge between ethnic Arabs and ethnic Africans in Darfur and Arab and African states that have been divided over how to respond to the crisis. Arab states have tended to support the Arab-dominated central government in Sudan.
Ban flew to Libya from Chad on the last leg of a three-nation tour to promote a political solution in Darfur and speedy deployment of a 26,000-strong African Union-UN peacekeeping force in the vast region of western Sudan.
During Ban's stopover in Chad, he discussed with President Idriss Deby a yearlong, 3,000-strong European Union-UN mission to protect Sudanese refugees and other civilians in the affected parts of Chad and Central African Republic.
Source: China Daily/agencies
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