By Laura MacInnis
GENEVA, June 18 (Reuters) - The U.N. Human Rights Council on Thursday narrowly opted to keep an investigator in Sudan for another year, despite calls from African states and their allies to stop scrutinising conditions in war-ravaged Darfur.
Western countries triumphed in a close vote to amend a weaker African-backed resolution and create a new mandate for an independent expert to monitor conditions in Sudan.
The post will replace the one held since 2005 by Sima Samar, a former deputy prime minister of Afghanistan, whose term as special rapporteur in Sudan is about to expire.
Its creation was opposed at the 47-member forum by countries including China, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.
The European Union had led efforts to keep watch on Sudan's Darfur region, where the United Nations estimates that 300,000 people have been killed and 2.7 million driven from their homes in six years of conflict.
The United States, which formally joins the Council on Friday, played a key behind-the-scenes role in negotiating the text, diplomats said.
Since being set up in 2006, the Human Rights Council has dropped its investigators for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, Belarus and Liberia. That leaves eight country-specific investigators for Burundi, Cambodia, Haiti, Myanmar, North Korea, the occupied Palestinian territories, Somalia and Sudan.
Amnesty International said in a statement that the U.N. body needed to keep a presence in Sudan to give it credibility as a watchdog for gross human rights violations.
Samar, whose post expires this month, presented a report this week warning that government forces were attacking civilians in Darfur by land and air, and that activists in the region were regularly arrested and tortured.
She also said all sides of the Darfur war had committed killings, torture and sexual violence against women and children, and that "large-scale killings" were continuing.
Abdel Daiem Zumrawi, under-secretary at Sudan's justice ministry, dismissed her findings, which he said "failed to give a true picture of human rights in Sudan".