(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-09-20 11:26

WASHINGTON - A US diplomat on Wednesday credited China with playing an important role in Darfur peace talks.

Andrew Natsios, President Bush's envoy to help solve the 4 1/2-year-old conflict in Sudan, said the primary obstacles to peace talks now are some of the dozens of rebel groups, rather than President Omar al-Bashir's Sudanese government.

Due to Chinese influence, Natsios said, Sudan's government has accepted a UN Security Council resolution passed in July to authorize a 26,000-member military and civilian peacekeeping operation.

Natsios told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, that he was impressed by China's behavior.

"I think the Chinese are like a locomotive that is speeding up," he said. "They are even doing things we didn't ask them to do."

On Tuesday, China sent a third batch of soldiers to the UN peacekeeping mission in southern Sudan to oversee a 2005 agreement that ended a long-running civil war.

Beijing also plans to send troops to the Darfur operation.

Natsios said putting in place a comprehensive agreement in southern Sudan is far behind schedule. The deal gives autonomy from the Muslim-dominated national government to the largely animist and Christian rebel administration in the south.