The United Nations says it hopes a deal aimed at ending a 21-year civil war in southern Sudan will help resolve a separate crisis in Sudan's troubled western Darfur region.
Clearing the way for an eventual deal to end Africa's longest-running civil war in southern Sudan, the Khartoum government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army signed three accords on Wednesday at a ceremony in Kenya.
That conflict pitted the SPLA in the mainly Christian and animist south against the northern Islamic government, killing an estimated two million, mainly through famine and disease.
With a comprehensive settlement in sight in the south of the oil-rich African nation, Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on the Khartoum government to seize the momentum and strive for a political solution to "the grave humanitarian and human rights situation" in Darfur, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said.
The United Nations raised its estimate of the number of people in dire need of aid in Darfur to two million from 1.2 million, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said.
A UN campaign to speed aid to Darfur, where Arab militias are driving out black Africans in what Mr Egeland has called a scorched-earth campaign of ethnic cleansing, has become "the most dramatic race against the clock that we have anywhere in the world at the moment," Egeland said.
"If we win this race, we will be able to provide food and nonfood (aid) to all of these internally displaced refugees. If we lose, hundreds of thousands of women and children, mostly, will perish," he told reporters.
Rebels took up arms in Darfur in February last year, accusing the Khartoum government of neglecting the area and arming Arab forces known as Janjaweed militias to loot and burn the villages of ethnic Africans.
Khartoum rejects the charges, accusing the rebel forces of attacking state buildings, killing state workers and kidnapping children as fighters.
Mr Egeland accused the government of failing to deliver on pledges to disarm the Janjaweed militias and ensure that aid workers had full access to hard-hit areas.