France's Kouchner returns to Africa, Darfur in mind

PARIS, June 6 (Reuters) French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner travels to Africa this week, his first official trip to the continent where he was once an aid worker, and diplomats say he will press for a high-level meeting on Darfur.

Kouchner, one of France's most popular figures thanks to humanitarian work which included co-founding medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, will travel to Mali tomorrow before heading to Chad, where violence in neighbouring Darfur has increasingly spilled across the border.

Kouchner hopes to bring together an ''enlarged contact group'' of foreign ministers in Paris this month from heavyweights such as the United States, Russia, and Sudan ally China, as well as key African players to pressure Sudan to accept a hybrid African Union and United Nations peacekeeping force, diplomats said.

''(The aim) is to have a broad political profile with people who do not necessarily have the same perspective, like the Chinese and the Americans, around a table and notably to push for the issue of the hybrid force,'' one French diplomat said.

France hopes the meeting, provisionally planned for June 25, will bring together about 20 countries and organisations, and that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will attend, he added.

Fighting between government-linked militias and rebel groups in Sudan's western Darfur region is thought to have killed 200,000 people and forced 2 million to flee their homes since 2003.

A dispute over who is to command a proposed 23,000-strong United Nations-African Union force is holding up deployment, according to UN officials, but the plans are expected to be delivered to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir soon.

Kouchner will attend the inauguration ceremony of Mali's President Amadou Toumani Toure and meet visiting heads of state, though diplomats said the list of meetings was not yet drawn up.

From there he will travel to Chad, where he will visit the area of Abeche in the east, near the border with Sudan, before meeting President Idriss Deby on Sunday, diplomats said, though the schedule may change.

CORRIDOR CLIMBDOWN Chad rejected yesterday a French suggestion that a humanitarian corridor be set up through its territory to channel aid to victims of violence in Darfur, and aid agencies have criticised the idea as potentially dangerous as it could cause confusion between aid workers and soldiers.

Kouchner appeared today to have scrapped the idea. ''You can't decide for other people. A humanitarian corridor is a good concept when it can be adapted to the situation,'' he told reporters as he left a weekly cabinet meeting.

''The corridor is a false issue,'' he said. ''The issue is to be useful. First, there will be a plan and a whole French initiative,'' he said.

Kouchner's ministry has said the corridor was just one of the initiatives it is examining.

Chad's government has been battling an eastern rebellion by insurgents it says have been backed in the past by Sudan.

It has said it only wants a UN police force, not a big military contingent, in its violent east, where UN agencies are looking after around 234,000 Sudanese refugees and 120,000 Chadian civilians who have fled attacks by armed groups.

''He will not make any concrete proposals at this stage. He will rather ask President Deby to accelerate acceptance of the UN presence as it is envisaged and possibly to see whether there are humanitarian needs that France can contribute to supporting,'' the diplomat said.

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