The UN Security Council will hold consultations Thursday afternoon on the humanitarian and security crises engulfing the Darfur region in Sudan as the United States is set to step up pressure on the Sudanese government.

The United States will formally introduce a new draft resolution on Sudan during the closed meeting, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard told reporters.

He said the council is also expected to discuss the claim by the United States that Arab militias' brutal attacks on civilians in Darfur are genocide.

The US circulated the new draft resolution to council members on Wednesday, calling on Sudan to allow the rapid deployment of more African Union monitors in Darfur and threatening sanctions onits oil sector if it fails to comply with the new resolution.

The draft says Sudan has failed to fully comply with a previousUN resolution and an agreement it reached with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to calm the situation in Darfur.

Annan told reporters on Wednesday that "more can and should be done" to improve security in Darfur, where at least 1.2 million people are internally displaced and another 200,000 live as refugees in neighboring Chad, largely because of attacks by armed militias allegedly allied to Khartoum.

In an earlier report to the Security Council, he proposed expanding the size of the force of African Union (AU) monitors in Darfur, an impoverished region the size of France that has been beset by conflict since two rebel groups took up arms against Khartoum early last year.

In Nigeria, AU mediators are meeting separately with representatives of the Sudanese government and the two rebel groups -- the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) -- to discuss a draft protocol on security.
 
(Xinhua News Agency  September 11, 2004)