Obama condemns Khartoum for expelling aid groups

Sudan expelled 13 aid groups after the International Criminal Court charged President Omar Hassan al-Bashir with war crimes in Darfur, where 4.7 million people rely on foreign assistance for food, shelter and protection from fighting.

"We have a potential crisis of greater dimensions than we already saw," Obama said in his first response to the move after talks with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the White House.

Obama said he had stressed in his talks with Ban the importance of the international community presenting a united front in making clear to Khartoum that it was "not acceptable to put that many people's lives at risk."

U.N. officials said on Tuesday the expulsion of the aid groups had paralyzed as much as half of the U.N.'s programs. They said they were unable to fill the gap left by the NGOs, which handed out food aid, monitored for disease outbreaks and provided clean water and healthcare across Darfur.

Obama pledged the United States would work with the United Nations in tackling the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, where U.N. officials say as many as 300,000 people have died since a conflict erupted in 2003.

Obama said he and Ban had spent most of their time discussing the situation in Darfur but also had wide-ranging talks that touched on the global economic crisis, the war in Afghanistan and climate change.

He said they had discussed the potential threat to the global food supply if the economic crisis worsened.

For his part, Ban said he would use the G20 summit in London next month to call on the leaders of industrialized nations to keep their promises of development aid to developing nations, where he said hundreds of millions of people had been hardest hit by the crisis.

Praising Obama's leadership, he said: "The United Nations stands ready to work together with you Mr President, to make this make or break year ... to make it work."

(Reporting by Ross Colvin; Editing by Eric Walsh)