BANJUL, Sept 14: Sudan President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir on Thursday fended off intense international pressure for him to accept UN peacekeepers in Darfur, denouncing what he called a hidden agenda to ‘recolonise’ his country.

But two senior members of Sudan’s national unity government, both ex-rebels, came out in favour of a UN mission in Darfur.

They said African Union peacekeepers already on the ground were failing to halt the bloodshed in the conflict-torn region.

Western leaders, some African presidents, and humanitarian groups are piling pressure on Bashir to accept a UN resolution to deploy more than 20,000 UN peacekeeping troops in Darfur, which has been rent by political and ethnic violence since 2003.

They say this is the only way to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in the west Sudanese region, where tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than two million displaced by fighting between government troops, rebels and militias.

On Thursday, Bashir again reaffirmed his resistance to a UN peacekeeping force.

“The UN forces have a hidden agenda in Sudan because they are not coming for peace in Darfur. They want to recolonise Sudan,” Bashir said in Gambia after a brief visit. “We are not ready to be ... recolonised,” he added.

But when Bashir later flew on to Dakar for a brief stopover, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade chided him for refusing to accept a UN force.

And even China, a close ally of Sudan, has been lobbying Khartoum to let UN peacekeepers into Darfur, Beijing’s UN ambassador said.

Bashir said the 7,000-strong AU peacekeeping force in Darfur had been successful and should continue, despite admissions by African leaders that it lacked resources and funding.

The AU mission expires on September 30 and the UN Security Council last month passed a resolution for more than 20,000 UN peacekeeping troops to take over in Darfur.

Distancing himself from Bashir’s line, Sudan’s most senior official on Darfur said he was not satisfied with what the AU was doing and would accept UN troops in the region.

Minni Arcua Minnawi, head of the former rebel Sudan Liberation Movement and now the fourth-ranking member of the presidency in Khartoum, said he was also worried about renewed fighting in North Darfur which has displaced tens of thousands.

“If there is no alternative, let the UN forces come,” he told Reuters and the BBC in a joint interview.

At Juba, in south Sudan, the country’s First Vice-President, Salva Kiir, also criticised the strategy of the dominant National Congress Party (NCP), which opposes a UN force and maintains the Darfur crisis can be solved militarily.

“The UN has maintained there is a need for an international force to intervene ... and we in the SPLM have consistently echoed this concern on humanitarian grounds,” Kiir, chairman of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), said.—Reuters