GENEVA, July 2 (Reuters) - The international community has made important strides toward defusing the four-year-old crisis in Sudan's Darfur region, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday.

He said addressing the political and ethnic violence in Darfur, a remote region bordering Chad, was "the highest priority agenda" for him and his team.

"During the last six months, we have made slow but credible and considerable progress in helping resolve this Darfur situation," he told a news conference in Geneva.

"The people in Darfur have suffered too much and the international community has waited too long. It is now high time for us to take necessary action, and I hope the Sudanese government will implement faithfully the commitment they have made," he said.

Under sustained international pressure, Sudan agreed on June 12 to a combined U.N. and African Union peacekeeping force of more than 20,000 troops and police for the region.

The force's aim is to stop the violence in Darfur, where international experts estimate 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been expelled from their homes since 2003 as a result of widespread murder, rape, abduction and arson.

Sudan, which says 9,000 people have died in the conflict, has sent mixed signals about the U.N.-AU force, saying it should be under the command and control of the African Union rather than of the U.N., and suggesting it should be mainly African.

Ban said Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir had "shown some signs of flexibility" in recent talks, in what he took as a hopeful sign.

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