US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Ethiopia today for talks aimed at tackling conflicts in the Great Lakes region, Somalia and Sudan.
On only her second trip in two years to sub-Saharan Africa, Ms Rice said she wanted to push international efforts to resolve those conflicts during meetings with African leaders during her 24-hour trip to Addis Ababa.
Ms Rice plans to meet leaders from Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda and ministers from Democratic Republic of Congo to discuss the conflict in the Great Lakes region that brings in all those countries.
Congo's President Joseph Kabila could not attend the meeting, said a US official.
Ms Rice's is seeking strategies to deal with what Washington says are "negative forces" including the FDLR (Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda), made up of key figures in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, as well as the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army and renegade Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda.
In meetings with Sudanese officials, Ms Rice said she would seek to prevent a north-south peace deal from unravelling, threatening a return to full scale civil war.
She will also discuss delays in deploying a UN-African Union peacekeeping force for Darfur.