Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir rejected the deployment of UN peacekeeping troops in his country's war-torn Darfur region during a meeting with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
"Justice is and remains our objective but through diplomatic, political and other means," he told a news conference on Saturday after talking with Annan at the Non-aligned Movement summit, according to the English translation of his statement in Arabic. "That's why we reject this position."
Annan urged the government of Sudan in an editorial distributed on Saturday to accept the UN Security Council's decision to replace the largely ineffective African Union force in Darfur with better-equipped UN peacekeepers.
"There can be no military solution to the crisis in Darfur," Annan wrote. "All parties should have understood by now, after so much death and destruction that only a political agreement, in which all stakeholders are fully engaged, can bring real peace to the region."
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