By Patrick Worsnip UNITED NATIONS, Sept 2 (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon flies to Sudan on Monday to push for talks between the government and rebels to end the four-year-old crisis in Darfur and clear the way for a big peacekeeping force. Ban, who will also visit neighboring Chad and Libya during a six-day tour, intends to press President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to commit to a negotiated solution and let the peacekeepers do their job, U.N. officials and diplomats say. Ban, who during his eight months in office has already met Bashir twice in other countries, has put top priority on resolving the conflict in Darfur, western Sudan. International experts estimate some 200,000 people have died and over 2 million been made homeless in Darfur since mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing central government of neglecting the region. Khartoum says 9,000 have died. Aides to Ban sought to play down expectations of the tour. "This is not a trip about breakthroughs. We're not at a breakthrough stage," one senior official said. "There's been progress. He (Ban) is going to be consolidating that progress there and he'll be laying the groundwork for additional forward movement." But diplomats said the stakes were high and that failure in Sudan would damage the world body's global efforts. Khartoum and rebel groups, of which there are currently about a dozen, have promised in principle to attend peace talks Ban hopes will take place in October. During his trip he could announce a venue and a more specific date. But violence in the arid region has intensified, with the rebels and the government trading charges of launching attacks. The United Nations says hundreds have died and another 25,000 people been driven from their homes in the past month. WAIT-AND-SEE While Khartoum has assented to the dispatch of a 26,000-strong peace force of African Union and U.N. troops and police -- probably early next year -- Western diplomats are waiting to see how it will work out in practice. A fiercely negotiated Security Council resolution that authorized the force in July has given rise to differing interpretations on its command-and-control and exact powers to use force to protect civilians. While enough offers have been received for infantry -- mainly from African states -- the U.N. is already behind schedule on recruiting specialized air, transport and logistical units, expected to come from developed countries. Ban will travel to the Darfur town of El-Fasher, where the peace force will be based, and visit a refugee camp. U.N. officials said he would also meet leaders from several such camps, but did not identify them. Separately, Ban will also visit the autonomous region of south Sudan, where a two-year-old deal that ended a 20-year north-south conflict has been looking increasingly fragile. Redeployments of northern and southern troops are behind target and no agreement has been reached on defining the north-south border. South Sudan, which has oil fields, is due to vote in 2011 on whether to secede altogether. U.N. officials said Ban would urge leaders in the region's capital, Juba, to meet their obligations under the peace deal. In Chad, which hosts more than 200,000 refugees from Darfur but has conflicts with rebels of its own, Ban hopes to put in place a second prong of his strategy -- deployment of another force to tackle the spillover from Sudan. Because Chadian President Idriss Deby objected to U.N. forces, European Union troops will provide the military muscle for that mission for the first year under plans expected to be approved in Brussels in mid-September. But a question mark remains over what happens after that. The U.N. chief winds up his tour in Libya, whose leader Muammar Gaddafi has hosted talks between Darfur's fractious rebel groups and is seen as an influential player.
