British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are prepared to make a joint personal trip to Darfur to seek an end to bloodshed in the region, the two leaders said as they met in Paris on Friday.
Brown, in France on his second foreign trip since taking office, said the death toll in Darfur — where 200 000 are thought to have been killed — was “unacceptable” and Britain and France would cooperate on a new plan to help end “one of the great humanitarian disasters”.
Britain would provide “substantial aid” to the people there, Brown said, but cooperation was needed from the Sudanese government.
He underscored the United Kingdom’s position that a new United Nations security council resolution was needed quickly. That would be followed up by French and British diplomatic action, he said, including officials monitoring of progress on the ground.
“We are prepared to go together to Darfur to make sure that the peace process is moving forward,” Brown told a news conference at the Élysée palace, adding that he wanted to talk to all of the relevant governments in the region.
Brown called for “urgent” action. “We can’t wait another month,” he said, as he paid tribute to France for taking a lead on pushing for peace in a region where conflict had “become endemic”.
Fighting in Darfur has displaced about two million people and made four million reliant on aid from the UN.
Sarkozy said: “People are dying and people are suffering and it must stop.”
The two leaders also announced that France and the UK would push for Europe-wide tax cuts on environmentally friendly cars. The leaders pledged to work closer on sharing information on fighting terrorism, with new quarterly meetings to be held between officials.
Brown said it was 103 years since the signing of the Entente cordiale and France and Britain were “entering a second century of cooperation” in a range of areas, with potential benefits to the whole world.
Earlier this week, Sarkozy’s spokesperson said the new French president wanted to “harmonise” relations with the UK and have greater cooperation on European Union matters. The move recalls previous unsuccessful attempts to create a “troika” of Germany, France and the UK, the EU’s biggest members, to shape its agenda. – Guardian Unlimited Â