Chinese ambassador to Norway Gao Jian said yesterday in Norwegian capital
Oslo that China will continue to work closely with other parties concerned and
try its best to provide support and assistance for the purpose of seeking a
solution to the Darfur issue in Sudan, according to reports.
At an international donors' conference, Gao made a speech about the Darfur
issue on behalf of the Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.
He said China has done its utmost to seek an appropriate solution to the
Darfur issue which includes actively participating in the peace-keeping
operation in the region.
"We have committed ourselves of sending a 315-man engineering unit. So far,
the first team of 143 engineers has already been dispatched to Darfur and
undertaking its jobs now. China is the first country which has entered the
region from outside of Africa in this regard," the ambassador said.
"Up to now, we have offered 80 million RMB of humanitarian assistance to the
region and an additional 1.8 million U.S. dollars to the AU peace-keeping
mission. And also in recent, we donated 500,000 U.S. dollars to the UN Trust
Fund which has helped to finance the mediation efforts of the AU and the UN
special envoys," he said.
In dealing with the Darfur issue, China has been all along a firm believer of
the "dual-track" strategy, and we are convinced that the peace-keeping operation
and the process of political negotiations should be pushed forward in a balanced
way, Gao emphasized.
It is our hope that all relevant parties would continue to promote a faster
deployment of the Hybrid Mission, in particular through the main channel of "the
tripartite mechanism" i.e. the Sudanese government, the AU and the UN, he said.
China is very much concerned about the lacking of progress in the political
process and "we call for the international community to exert positive influence
urging the opposition parties in the Darfur region to return to the negotiation
table at an earlier date", Gao added.
The two-day Sudan Donor Nations Conference will review progress on the
implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), a 2005 peace deal
that ended more than two decades of civil war in Sudan, according to the
Norwegian Foreign Ministry.
The meeting is also expected to generate new pledges of aid and donations to
support reconstruction and further development in Sudan, the ministry said in a
statement.
