Joint envoy Rodolphe Adada said on Sunday that he has made some progress on the deployment of a new UN-African Union peacekeeping force for Darfur after talks with Sudanese officials.
Adada "expressed the pressing need for solving all these outstanding issues at this critical phase since the AU, UN and government of Sudan are committed to start the hybrid operation by end of this year in the best possible condition," a statement said.
He expressed satisfaction with the facilities provided for the new joint force in the towns of El-Fasher and Nyala and received assurances from foreign ministry under-secretary Mutrif Sidiq that similar arrangements would be made in both Geneina and Zalingei, the statement said.
He also won assurances from Sudan that communications equipment for the new joint force of 26,000 or so personnel would be released by customs by the end of the week.
Sidiq rejected a request for blanket authorisation for night-time operations at the airport in the main Darfur town of El-Fasher, agreeing that "the airport will be open for medical evacuation only until its capabilities are upgraded".
The statement said the meeting had been "held in a good spirit" but it made no mention of Sudan's rejection of offers from several governments to contribute to the new force, including Nepal and Thailand as well as Scandinavian states.
Deployment of the new expanded force, intended to replace an overstretched AU mission, is already running several months behind schedule and only a third of its eventual strength is likely to be in place on time, its commander said on Saturday.
"It was stated that by the end of August we would know all the troop contribution countries. Today we're in December. We don't know so you can see how many months we are behind," General Martin Luther Agwai told reporters.
Best case scenario would be 9,000 personnel on the ground when the mandate begins on January 1, but that will include the some 6,200 troops currently in Darfur in the AU mission to merge into the UN command, he said.
Nine thousand is just over a third of the 26,000 envisaged for the joint AU-UN force and the number that Agwai, from Nigeria, described the "barest minimum of what is required."
Getting the force off the ground has been beset by logistics problems and still no country has donated any of the 24 helicopters vital if the mission across territory the size of Texas is to be effective.
More than 200,000 people have died from fighting, famine and disease since ethnic minority rebels rose up against the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum in 2003, according to international organisations.
Another 2.2 million have been displaced in what the United Nations has called the biggest humanitarian crisis facing the world today.
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