The African Union said on Tuesday that it would quit the war-ravaged Darfur region by the end of the month if Sudan did not agree to allow UN peacekeepers to take over its mission here.
"The African Union reiterates its position that it will terminate the mission," said Noureddine Mezni, spokesman for the African force. But the troops will stay "if there is the necessity for the transition to the United Nations," he added.
The message, in effect refusing an offer from Sudan and its allies to pay the troops in Darfur with money from the Arab League, leads the crisis in western Sudan to the edge of a once unthinkable precipice: the possibility that after the end of this month there will be no outside peacekeepers at all in Darfur.
African Union officials stressed that negotiations were continuing on the future of the force and the possibility of a UN transfer, but also quietly began preparing plans to extricate the 7,000 troops, a complex and costly proposition for an outfit that is nearly out of cash.
An evacuation without a UN force to take over would almost certainly open a bloody chapter in a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and pushed 2.5 million from their homes in a campaign of state-sponsored violence that the Bush administration has called genocide.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told reporters in Egypt that Sudan would be making a grave mistake by causing a vacuum in Darfur.
"The international community has been feeding about 3 million people in camps, and if we have to leave because of lack of security, lack of access to the people, then what happens?" he asked. "The government will have to assume responsibility for doing this, and if it doesn't succeed, it will have lots of questions to answer before the rest of the world."
The negotiations over who will police Darfur, a lawless region the size of France that is currently patrolled by the outnumbered and underequipped African Union force, have turned into a game of brinkmanship among the UN, the African Union and Sudan.
The African Union has said repeatedly that it wants to hand over its mission to the UN. In part to speed this process, the US and other donors who have paid for the African Union mission have refused to prop it up financially once its mandate ends on Sept. 30, in the hopes of compelling Sudan to accept a UN force. The Security Council voted earlier this month to authorize a force of more than 20,000 troops and police officers for Darfur.
But Sudan has not blinked. If anything it has become more strident in its rejection of a UN force, and now is turning on the African Union, giving it one week to decide whether to keep going with money from the Arab League, or to leave Darfur. It has proposed using Sudanese as peacekeepers.
African Union officials have said their troops would compromise their neutrality if they took money from Sudan and its allies.
Mezni said he had hopes of a compromise. The African Union Peace and Security Council, which must decide the future of the force, will meet again on Sept. 18, he added.
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