Annan to brief UN Council, US mulls Darfur action

By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS, July 7 (Reuters) – U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was due to brief the 15 Security Council members on how to stop atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region, with aid groups fearful deaths and rapes will multiply.

Lurking in the background are U.S. threats to push through a council resolution that would impose travel and arms sanctions on the leaders of Darfur’s Janjaweed militia, accused of pillaging, raping and killing black African villagers.

But diplomats say Washington was considering an expansion of the embargoes to include the Sudanese government if Khartoum takes no visible action by next week.

“It will be more about sanctioning Khartoum than the Janjaweed,” said one senior council diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

However, not all council members are willing to move quickly. China, which has close economic ties with Sudan, is hesitating, as are Islamic nations Pakistan and Algeria, council members said.

Annan, who visited Khartoum and Darfur in the same week as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, is in Nairobi, Kenya. He has set up a video broadcast to council members on Wednesday .

“The ruined villages, the camps overflowing with sick and hungry women and children, the fear in the eyes of the people, should be a clear warning to us all,” Annan told a summit of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Tuesday.

Some 10,000 to 30,000 people are estimated to have died. One million were forced out of their villages and 2 million are in desperate need of aid. More than 150,000 refugees have fled to neighbouring, impoverished Chad, U.N. officials say.

Sudanese officials have promised to curtail the Janjaweed and have said they are lifting all restrictions on aid groups trying to help uprooted villagers locked in camps by the militia, many of them Arab nomadic pastoralists who were driven onto African farmlands by drought in Sudan’s west.

ATTACKS ON AID CONVOYS

But U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said on Tuesday that Sudan’s government and a rebel group had set up checkpoints on a number of routes used by aid groups. She said humanitarian convoys had been stopped and attacked by uniformed men, military personnel and “unidentified persons on camels.”

The question, diplomats say, is whether Khartoum is willing or even able to stop the scorched earth policy of the militia when its troops often back the Janjaweed, who have also been seen in Sudanese army uniforms.

But for many people in Darfur, the world’s attention may have come too late, even as U.N. agencies and other international relief groups rush food, medicine and shelter to the homeless as the rainy season sets in.

“With the large number of people in camps and in cities, who are displaced, the risk of infectious disease epidemics, outbreaks of diseases from dirty water, from lack of sanitation, is very high,” said Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“Everything that can sustain and succour life — livestock, food stores, wells and pumps, blankets and clothing — has been looted or destroyed. Villages have been torched not randomly, but systematically — often not once, but twice,” Human Rights Watch reported.