The US military is considering sending a team to Chad to assess conditions for a possible humanitarian mission that would help refugees from Sudan's strife-plagued Darfur region, a radio report said on Thursday.
The Voice of America (VOA) quoted a senior Pentagon official as saying the US military's European Command was preparing to send a Humanitarian Assessment Survey Team (HAST) to Chad, where many refugees have fled to avoid the conflict in neighboring western Sudan.
The ethnic conflict, which has overshadowed the recent settlement of another conflict in the country's south, has left 30,000 people dead and displaced another 1 million people as Janjaweed militia, reportedly with government backing, attacked black Muslim rebels in the region.
The US team would be similar to the HAST unit sent to Liberia last year as the country faced anarchy. The US European Command, which is responsible for Africa, would send to Chad a team that could include military specialists who would assess needs for a possible civil-military operation, the VOA said.
The official, who was unnamed by the VOA, said no decision had been made yet to send out the HAST team. But Pentagon officials indicated they were watching developments there closely.
UN Secretary-general Kofi Annan said on Thursday that the Sudanese government had denied any involvement in the killings. While the killings of civilians in Darfur violated international humanitarian law, Annan said they could not be described as genocide or ethnic cleansing.
Annan said he would visit Sudan next month to look into the humanitarian situation in the region.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the Pentagon had not been asked to consider a mission.
In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, UN Children's Agency director Carol Bellamy asked for urgent international help for displaced people in the Darfur region.
"The race is against time to come to the aid of 1 million internally displaced people before the onset of the rainy season shortly," Bellamy said. The rains will bog down aid transports.
She met earlier this week in Khartoum with Sudanese President Omer Hassan al-Bashir, who she said pledged his government would ensure basic services to civilians in Darfur. Sudan is under international pressure to open access for humanitarian groups to the region. Other UN agencies and international organizations, including the Red Cross, were also working in Darfur.
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