By Su Qiang (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-08-31 07:26

China and the United Kingdom have taken their first collaborative step to resolving the Darfur issue and will continue to move forward on political and economic fronts, a visiting British minister said Thursday.

"We got the first step of collaboration around resolution and peacekeeping, I am also looking forward to working with China on other two fronts - political solution and development aid," Mark Brown, minister for Africa, Asia and the United Nations, said in Beijing.

"Having China at the table is not only vital to acceptability and international legitimacy of resolutions, but it is vital to the success of getting to the finishing line."

He also noted that the situation in Darfur had changed significantly over last six months.

The starting point was a meeting last November in Addis Ababa where then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan gathered different parties together to try to find a way forward.

In that meeting, China was active in bridging differences between the government of Sudan and Western critics over its policy, he said.

Most notably, during China's presidency of the UN Security Council in July, the Security Council approved the Resolution 1769, which was initiated by the UK and France and passed 15 to zero, Brown said.

"We have a completely different situation now", he said.

It resulted in the first Sudanese acceptance of the UN resolution, willingness of troop-contributing countries to pledge troops as well as a platform to move beyond peacekeeping to try to find a political solution, he said.