President Obama declared today he cares deeply about Darfur and wants a strong unified international message to get aid groups back on the ground in Darfur. This is the extract of his comments to the press after his meeting with United Nation’s Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon:
"…one of the things that we spent I think the most time talking about was the issue of Darfur. As many of you are aware, we have an ongoing crisis in Darfur that has heightened recently, where the Khartoum government has kicked out some of the most important nongovernmental organizations that provide direct humanitarian aid to millions of people who’ve been internally displaced in the Sudan."
"And we have a potential crisis of even greater dimensions that what we already saw. I impressed upon the Secretary General how important it is from our perspective to send a strong, unified, international message that it is not acceptable to put that many people’s lives at risk; that we need to be able to get those humanitarian organizations back on the ground; and that the United States wants to work as actively as possible with the United Nations to try to resolve the immediate humanitarian crisis and to start putting us on a path for long-term peace and stability in the Sudan."
"And this is something that the United States Secretary to the United Nations, Secretary Rice, has been working on diligently. It’s something that we care about deeply. And we’re hopeful that we can make some significant progress."