The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, yesterday sought Austrian EU presidency backing for an urgent ministerial mission to southern Sudan. Praising the EU for its contribution to humanitarian aid, Mr Andrews said a mission to the "heart of the famine" was important, however, to contribute a better understanding of the crisis.
He said he was anxious to keep the issue high on the Union's agenda as the famine was intensifying, creating untold human misery.
"We have got to see what is needed at first hand," he said, arguing that diplomatic missions to Khartoum were simply not enough.
He hoped the Presidency would agree to send a mission of one or more foreign ministers in which he was willing to take part.
Meanwhile, in a significant shift of position on Kosovo, the Foreign Ministers called on the Albanian community to provide a united front for any talks process, implicitly recognising for the first time the right of the Kosovo Liberation Army to be represented. The move recognises the unwelcome reality that the KLA now controls as much as one third of the province.
"The Kosovo Albanian team for these talks must be able to speak authoritatively and therefore be fully representative of their community," the ministers said in a statement. But the EU's position is still to oppose any demand for secession and to support only autonomy within the Yugoslav Federation. "The situation is explosive. Time is running out," the French Foreign Minister, Mr Hubert Vedrine, warned.
Earlier, in the foreign ministers' open debate on the next EU budget package, Agenda 2000, Mr Andrews warned that although Ireland would do what it could to see "substantial progress" made during the Austrian presidency it was "difficult to see how agreement could be reached on the more difficult aspects, outside the overall framework of the final package" - code for nothing will be agreed until everything is agreed at the March summit next year which is supposed to finalise the deal.
