DAKAR (Reuters) - Senegal’s president said on Thursday George W. Bush told African leaders at one stage the United States might send troops to Sudan’s Darfur if they did not act to halt what he saw as genocide there.

A Rwandan soldier from the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) watches girls fetching water on donkeys go past in the town of Tawila, North Darfur in this handout picture taken July 2, 2008. REUTERS/Albany Associates/Stuart Price/Handout

President Abdoulaye Wade said Bush, who has lobbied strongly for robust international action to end the five-year-old conflict in Darfur, had made the warnings to him, but he did not specify when or in what circumstances.

Commenting on the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor’s move this week to seek a war crimes arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Wade said Bush had “always proclaimed loudly and clearly that the United States considered Bashir had committed genocide in Darfur”.

“I’ve had to transmit to President Bashir and to my other African colleagues President Bush’s warnings that if Africa didn’t do anything to end the tragedy in Darfur, the United States could bypass the (United Nations) Security Council and send contingents to Darfur,” the Senegalese leader said in a statement issued in Dakar.

“Myself and other African colleagues tried to dissuade him from this and to convince him to leave us to try to sort out this problem among us Africans,” he added.

The United States has supported the deployment of a joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur and has even helped to airlift international peacekeepers to and from the violence-torn western Sudanese region.

However Washington, stretched by heavy military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, has stopped short of sending its own troops to Darfur, where foreign experts estimate 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes in five years of political and ethnic conflict.

Asked about Wade’s comments, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said: “The president is committed to supporting the AU-UN peacekeeping force.”

SUFFERING OF CIVILIANS

Wade said he had taken Bush’s warning to send troops to Darfur “very seriously ... especially since in the case of (the U.S.-led invasion of) Iraq, he’d informed me two days in advance”.

Wade, who has tried to mediate to help end the fighting in Darfur, said he was aware of the suffering of civilians there and, as a defender of human rights, could not stand by while a crime was being committed.

“It’s not up to me to defend President Bashir if he is guilty,” he said in his statement.

Echoing a view taken by the African Union this week, Wade said the ICC prosecutor’s indictment against Bashir could worsen the situation in Darfur and create “indescribable chaos”.

He added he would prefer to see a one-year suspension of any arrest warrant against the Sudanese president, which would allow investigations into his case to continue.

“In law, you are innocent until proven guilty,” the octogenarian Senegalese president, a lawyer by training, said.

“Myself and other heads of state in Africa, in cooperation with the African Union Commission, will do what is necessary in relation to President Bashir so that all measures can be taken to achieve a just and lasting solution to this crisis,” Wade said in his statement, without giving further details.

(editing by Andrew Dobbie)