UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has thanked U.S. President George W. Bush for his country's recent commitment to airlift supplies urgently needed by the joint United Nations-African Union (AU) peacekeeping force in the strife-torn Darfur region of Sudan, a UN spokesperson said here Wednesday.
"The expedited arrival to Darfur of this material, which includes trucks and other essential equipment, will strengthen the ability of the United Nations to protect civilians and carry out other aspects of its mandate," Michele Montas, the spokesperson for the UN secretary-general, said in a statement.
The hybrid force, known as UNAMID, was set up by the Security Council to protect civilians in Darfur, where an estimated 300,000people have been killed and another 2.7 million have been forced from their homes since fighting erupted in 2003, pitting rebels against Sudan's government forces and allied Janjaweed militiamen, UN officials said.
The U.S. initiative "sets a constructive precedent for broad international support to expeditiously deploy UNAMID," the statement noted, adding that the secretary-general calls on other Member States to consider similar efforts to speed up the deployment of the mission.
At full strength, UNAMID, which marked its first anniversary last week, is slated to become the world body's largest peacekeeping operation with some 26,000 military and police personnel.
One year on from transferring the task of suppressing the violence to UNAMID from the AU Mission in Sudan (AMIS), some 12,374 blue helmets are now in place across Darfur, which is 63 per cent of the 19,555 military personnel authorized by the Security Council.
Source:Xinhua
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