UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon headed for Sudan today to lay the groundwork for a solution to the festering Darfur conflict through talks and deployment of thousands of peacekeepers.
Mr Ban, who was flying to Khartoum from a meeting of senior UN staff in Turin, Italy, will seek commitment to his plan from Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and visit a refugee camp in the western Sudanese Darfur region itself.
While Darfur will be the focus, his six-day tour will also include a trip to south Sudan, where a 2005 peace deal ending a 20-year north-south war that killed two million people is looking shaky, and take in visits to neighbouring Chad and Libya.
International experts estimate some 200,000 have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes during over four years of fighting in Darfur. Sudan puts the death toll from the conflict, which flared when rebel groups took up arms against the government, charging it with neglect, at 9,000.
Last week, Mr Ban sketched out a three-point approach to the crisis: deployment of 26,000 UN and African Union troops and police, approved by the Security Council in July, peace talks tentatively scheduled for October, and aid.