Cairo ? The outgoing U.N. peacekeeping chief in Sudan’s Darfur region said the world should no longer consider the long-running conflict a war after a sharp decline in violence and deaths over the past year.

Activists and Darfur residents disagree, and the comments by Rodolphe Adada heightened anxiety that there will be less international focus on resolving the root problems in the troubled region.

U.N. peacekeepers have recorded a sharp decline in fatalities from violence. There were 16 deaths in June, compared with an average 130 deaths per month last year.

“We can no longer talk of a big conflict, of a war in Darfur,” Adada told The Associated Press this week before stepping down as head of the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur, or UNAMID.

“I think now everybody understands it. We can no longer speak of this issue. It is over,” he said.

The Darfur conflict began in February 2003 when ethnic African rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government in Khartoum, claiming discrimination and neglect.