France yesterday offered to send a warship off the coast of Somalia, the United States warned Sudan to honour a cease-fire and Belgian advocated withholding aid from nations that exploited child soldiers.
But African delegates cautioned UN Security Council members at a summit on Africa called by France yesterday that they, not the West, needed to set their own agenda and too many promises had gone by the wayside.
"Africa's agenda will increasingly be defined by the African Union," said AU chairman Alpha Oumar Konare. "We hope to move beyond words, to move beyond promises because too many promises have already been made to Africa."
US President George W Bush on the situation in Darfur
The unusual session at the UN in New York on cooperation with Africa, chaired by French President Nicholas Sarkozy, came several hours after the 15-member body authorized the European Union to send soldiers to Chad and the Central Africa Republic to protect civilians from violence spilling over from neighboring Darfur.
President John Agyekum Kufour of Ghana said warfare in Somalia was being neglected in favor of the strife in Sudan's Darfur region, where help for an African force "has been inadequate and slow in coming."
In response, Mr Sarkozy said France had decided to help counter piracy off Somalia's coast by sending a warship to protect supplies from the World Food Programme.
President George W. Bush as well as Mr Sarkozy called for quick deployment of a planned United Nations-African Union force to Darfur to bolster the 7,000 African troops there.
"We call on all parties to cease arm sales to the combatants," Mr Bush said. "We expect people gathered around this table to send a focused message that innocent life matters."
"We expect President (Omar Hassan) Bashir to observe a cease-fire during next month's peace talks, and we want the rebels to do the same," Mr Bush said.
He alone emphasized that the United States considered the deaths of tens of thousands in Darfur "genocide."
"When we find genocide it's time to do something about it," he said.
Britain's minister of state in the Foreign Office, Kim Howells, touched on Sudan and the African Union's rejection of non-African troops for the new Darfur force.
He also said the United Nations should be engaged to find a way forward in Zimbabwe because "three million refugees have already fled, threatening instability across Zimbabwe's borders."
Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, using the example of the Uganda's brutal rebel Lord's Resistance Army, said the world should embargo development aid and exports of weapons to countries with child soldiers.