Paris ? The world has fallen down on the job of ending the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday as she welcomed the fresh energy that France’s new conservative-led government has put to the cause.

She called the four-year-old conflict “one of the true humanitarian disasters that we face in international politics, and one the international community has simply got to act more quickly and more responsibly to stop.”

Rice also welcomed a summit today between the Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Egypt, calling Arab support for embattled Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas more important than his Western backing. She acknowledged the difficulties Abbas has faced since his Islamic rivals Hamas won Palestinian elections last year.

“Democracy is hard,” she told reporters at a press conference with French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.

The chief U.S. diplomat was in Paris for two days of get-to-know-you meetings with the new French government and a strategy session on Darfur.

Kouchner organized today’s conference to speed deployment of about 20,000 new peacekeeping troops to Darfur, the vast, arid region where an estimated 200,000 have died in fighting between African rebels and militias backed by the Arab-led Sudanese government. The conflict has driven about 2.5 million from their homes.

“I have seen firsthand the devastation and the difficult circumstances in which people live in Darfur, and I will be very frank,” Rice said. “I do not think that the international community has really lived up to its responsibilities there.”

Rice visited Darfur in 2005, spending an afternoon in a refugee camp. Kouchner, a Socialist doctor who co-founded the Nobel Prize-winning aid group Doctors Without Borders, has been to Darfur more frequently and more recently.

Sudan was not invited to the Paris conference, a decision that Kouchner justified Sunday.

“This is not a ‘peacemaking’ meeting, but on the contrary, a meeting to support the international efforts that have been deployed,” he said.

Before arriving Sunday, Rice warned Sudan’s government not to renege on its recent agreement to allow a larger peacekeeping force into Darfur. The peacekeepers would come from the African Union and the United Nations.

“If in fact the Sudanese are prepared to accept the hybrid force, they need to accept it once and for all and stop the process of trying to scale it back,” Rice said in a press conference aboard her plane. “It seems one step forward, two steps back with the Sudanese government.”