UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon promised to step up efforts to end the four-year-old conflict on his first visit to Darfur Wednesday and urged the world to be more sympathetic to the millions of people whose lives have been uprooted. He said the deployment of a 26,000-strong African Union-U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur was now on a «good track» and «it is crucially important that a political negotiation process start now.» U.N. and AU envoys have been trying to get eight key rebel groups back to the negotiating table with the Sudanese government and Ban said «we are coming close to agreeing on the venue and date.» «I'm really going to step up this political negotiation process,» he said on the third day of a trip to Sudan that will also take him to Chad and Libya, the Associated Press reported. The secretary general spoke to reporters en route to North Darfur's capital of El Fasher from Juba in southern Sudan, where he stressed the link between a political solution in Darfur and implementation of a 2005 peace agreement ending the 21-year civil war between Sudanese government in the north and rebels in the south. He was greeted at El Fasher's airport under extremely tight security by the governor of North Darfur, Mohamed Osman Kibir, before receiving an official welcome at the AU headquarters.
