Libya's Gaddafi pledges help in Darfur talks-Ban

SIRTE, Libya, Sep 8 (Reuters) Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi pledged today to gather as many Darfur rebel groups as possible for peace talks with Khartoum due to be held in Libya next month, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said.

Ban was speaking after meeting Gaddafi near the Libyan town of Sirte on the last leg of a three-country African tour aimed at paving the way for a Darfur settlement.

He announced in Khartoum on Thursday that the peace conference, which he hopes will bring a ''final settlement'' to the four-year-old Darfur conflict, would take place on October 27 at a venue in Libya still to be decided.

''(Gaddafi) said he will do all to bring all the leaders of the movements to participate in the meeting,'' Ban said. ''I am very grateful for his flexibility and willingness to provide necessary assistance and hospitality.'' UN officials have said that Libya won out as the venue over Tanzania and other nations that had offered to host the talks because it had the best chance of bringing the maximum number of rebel groups together.

The North African state has already hosted two meetings of the groups this year aimed at unifying their strategy before they negotiate with Khartoum. The United Nations currently considers about eight rebel groups to be major players.

Ban met Gaddafi in a large green and yellow tent patterned with palm trees and camels in a sealed-off compound just outside the coastal town of Sirte, the area where the Libyan leader was born.

Gaddafi, who has led Libya for 38 years, was wearing a brown shirt sporting green prints of the African continent.

Ban said that in a ''constructive and fruitful'' meeting lasting almost an hour and a half he had agreed with Gaddafi that the United Nations, the African Union and Libya should work closely on the run-up to the talks.

He proposed that UN special envoy Jan Eliasson, who will mediate the negotiations alongside his AU counterpart Salim Ahmed Salim, and Libya's Africa minister, Ali Treiki, should serve on a high level support team.

EU FORCE IN CHAD Ban also said Gaddafi had expressed ''full support'' for the planned deployment of a European Union force in Chad, which borders Darfur and has been flooded with refugees in its already unstable east.

There had been reports that Libya opposed the plan.

Gaddafi promotes African solutions to African problems. He has sought to broker peace between feuding neighbours Chad and Sudan, which he regards as his diplomatic turf, and has in the past denounced outside involvement in peacekeeping in Africa.

The peace conference in Libya would seek to end a conflict that has generated one of the world's worst humanitarian crises and sparked US accusations -- dismissed by Sudan -- of genocide. Much of the killing, rape and looting has been blamed on a government-allied militia known as the Janjaweed.

International experts estimate some 200,000 people have died and over 2 million have been made homeless in Darfur since an uprising against alleged government neglect of the region flared in 2003. Khartoum puts the death toll at 9,000.

The staging of the Darfur talks in Libya marks another step in the country's re-emergence on the world stage after years in which it was ostracised by the West for alleged sponsorship of terrorism and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

Some rebel leaders have expressed disappointment with Ban's visit to Sudan and said they had low expectations for the peace talks. One, Paris-based Abdel Wahid Mohamed el-Nur, founder of the Sudan Liberation Movement, has said he will not attend.

Ban dodged questions on whether or how Gaddafi would persuade Nur, who enjoys major support in Darfur refugee camps included one visited by the U.N. leader on Wednesday, to come.

But he has said in the past week it would be in Nur's interests to take part.

REUTERS TB RN0122