The United States wants to see UN forces deployed to Sudan's Darfur province, the White House said on Saturday, denying word of a major policy shift to end what it calls genocide there.
US President George W. Bush "is committed to ending the violence in Darfur, and we're looking at multiple ways of doing that, but we fully support the UN resolution and the deployment of UN forces in the region as soon as possible," spokesman Tony Fratto told AFP.
His comments came after Bush's special envoy for Sudan, Andrew Natsios, suggested that Washington, in what would be a major policy reversal, was backing away from demands for a UN peacekeeping force in the bloodied region.
"The president believes that there needs to be a credible and effective international force. As you would expect, we will explore any option that would bring peace to Darfur, but those options would be within the context of the UN resolution," said Fratto.
"There is no shift in our policy, and that's not what the special envoy was describing," he said as Bush campaigned for Republican candidates ahead of the November 7 US legislative elections.
Natsios had said that Washington and other Western governments were looking for an "alternate way" to deal with the violence in Darfur, which has left at least 200,000 people dead and 2.5 million homeless in the past three and a half years.
"Our real interest here is not what it is called or what it looks like in terms of its helmet, but how robust and how efficient it is," Natsios said in an interview with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum which was posted on the museum's website on Friday.
"If it does not have a United Nations helmet but it is very competent and very aggressive, then we have fulfilled our intention," he said.
Washington could accept either a strengthened African Union force or one led by Arab or Muslim nations, possibly backed by UN financial or logistical support, he said.
It was the first public suggestion that the United States was reconsidering its backing for an August 31 UN Security Council resolution, which Washington sponsored, demanding the immediate deployment of some 20,000 UN troops to replace an ineffective African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur.