By Irwin Arieff UNITED NATIONS, Jan 18 (Reuters) - The United Nations, blocked by Sudan from sending U.N. peacekeepers to Darfur, is weighing how to send a smaller force into neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic, U.N. officials said on Thursday. An assessment team of about 30 U.N. staff is leaving for the unstable region on Friday and will spend two weeks studying how many troops would be needed to protect and aid civilians caught up in the fighting there, how to get them into the remote area, and how to supply them once they were in place. One possible approach is to send battalions of about 700 to 800 soldiers to each of Chad's three eastern provinces -- Salamat, Ouaddai and Biltine -- and a fourth battalion to the Central African Republic's northern Vakaga province, officials said. Because the area along the two countries' border with Darfur is isolated and landlocked, the force could end up costing as much as $1 billion a year, said a senior U.N official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity. That was the price tag of the significantly larger peacekeeping mission the world body hoped to send into Darfur last year before it was blocked by the Sudan government. Khartoum, which has compared U.N. soldiers to neocolonialists, wants to allow in only an expanded African Union force, building on the 7,000 AU troops already in the western Sudanese region torn by four years of civil war. The fighting in Darfur spilled over into Chad and the Central African Republic last year, forcing civilians near the border to flee to camps already crowded with hundreds of thousands of refugees that had earlier fled Darfur. Both nations have requested U.N. help, and the Security Council in June asked the peacekeeping department to explore how to protect the camps and provide humanitarian aid. The council this month pressed the peacekeeping department to step up its efforts after an assessment mission sent in late November recommended against deploying a U.N. mission there until all parties agreed to stop fighting and begin negotiating a political solution. "We have to find a way to stop the fighting and begin a political process," the senior official said. "For peacekeeping, there must be a peace to keep." The official said some of the rebels operating in the area, whether fighting to topple the Chad government, the Central African Republic authorities or the Sudanese government, were clearly being financed by outsiders. U.N. staff had seen fighters in new uniforms, driving new pickup trucks and equipped with "serious weaponry," he said. The assessment mission is due to submit its recommendations to the 15-nation Security Council by mid-February. In anticipation of dispatching peacekeepers to the region, the next step would be to send an advance team of perhaps a few hundred staff to prepare for an eventual deployment, the official said.
