LONDON, July 24: European allies joined the United States on Saturday in heaping pressure on Sudan to end a conflict in its western Darfur region which threatens millions of lives and has been labelled genocide by the US Congress.

As France's foreign minister prepared to visit Darfur, Britain's top military commander General Mike Jackson said his country could muster 5,000 troops to intervene in Darfur and the European Union's top diplomat urged Sudan to disarm the Arab militias accused of razing black African villages.

European action may bolster a transatlantic alliance fractured by the 2003 US-led war on Iraq and appears at a time when a US-drafted resolution at the United Nations, seeking to threaten Sudan with sanctions, has been stalled by objections from fellow Security Council members China and Russia.

"If need be, we will be able to go to Sudan. I suspect we could put a brigade together very quickly indeed," Jackson, Britain's Chief of General Staff, told the BBC.

Britain, Sudan's largest cash donor, has said it holds Khartoum responsible for ending a conflict that has already killed an estimated 30,000 people and accused the United Nations of being slow to respond. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said this week he had not ruled out military intervention.

The 15-month conflict in Sudan's western Darfur, pitting nomadic Arab 'Janjaweed' militias against black Africans, has forced a million people from their villages and left two million in desperate need of aid, UN officials say.

RAPE, DEATH AND REFUGEES: The conflict has grown while Khartoum also trudges toward peace with southern rebels to end Africa's longest civil war. An accord between the government and southern rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army on power-sharing and disputed strategic areas of Africa's largest country was agreed in May.

Some 180,000 Darfur refugees have swollen camps across the border in eastern Chad to escape the mounted militia accused of raping, killing, looting, burning villages, poisoning water supplies and destroying crops.

Television pictures from Chad show camps full of thin women and children living on meagre rations with little more than a few sticks for shelter after stumbling for days and weeks to camps short of water, food, sanitation and medical equipment.

More than a million people remain displaced inside Darfur.

EU Foreign Policy Javier Solana told Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail in Brussels on Friday that Khartoum must disarm the Janjaweed.

"He (Solana) urged the government to arrest the leaders of the Janjaweed, as a first significant step towards the dismantling of these militias, which are held accountable for most of the human rights violations," Solana's spokeswoman said in a statement issued on Saturday.

French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier prepared for a three-day African trip starting on Monday, that will begin with a visit to el-Fasher, capital of North Darfur state. He will also go to Senegal, Chad and South Africa to show French support for African Union efforts to effect a cease-fire in the region.

"Naturally, we hope that a solution can come as soon as possible and that is why the minister is going there," said a spokeswoman for the French Foreign Ministry on Friday.

GENOCIDE?: Despite the draft UN resolution and a fact-finding trip by US Secretary of State Colin Powell, critics say President George W. Bush's administration is reacting too slowly to save a threatened African ethnic group exactly one decade after the international community failed to stop genocide in Rwanda.