Sudan’s dictator gets nastier
Editorial, The Washington Post
July 2, 2006 — This year, Sudan’s government declared that it would allow United Nations peacekeepers into the western region of Darfur once a peace deal had been concluded. Then a peace deal was signed in May, and the government reversed itself. President Omar Hassan al-Bashir recently swore that “there will not be any international military intervention in Darfur as long as I am in power.”
“We will not accept colonial forces coming into the country,” he continued, attributing U.S. pressure for intervention to “Jewish organizations.” Meanwhile, Mr. Bashir has some interesting organizations on his side. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy leader of al-Qaeda, recently accused the United Nations of preparing to occupy Sudan and divide it.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan was due to meet Mr. Bashir this weekend. But his chances of persuading the president to change his mind seem negligible. It’s not that Mr. Bashir has any principled objection to “colonialist” peacekeepers; he has already accepted a 10,000-strong U.N. deployment in Sudan’s south as part of a previous peace agreement. It’s simply that Mr. Bashir has calculated that he can snub the international community with impunity. As well as ruling out peacekeepers for Darfur, Mr. Bashir has recently imposed a two-day suspension on most Western aid efforts in Darfur and is blockading humanitarian access to the victims of another crisis in Sudan’s east. His fighters are exporting instability to neighboring Chad. And he has missed a deadline in the Darfur peace deal for submitting a timetable for disarming the genocidal janjaweed militia.
History has demonstrated that Mr. Bashir’s regime is susceptible to foreign pressure. Sustained diplomacy pushed him into a peace deal with the south and forced him to allow a small contingent of African Union peacekeepers into Darfur. But the external pressure has to be consistent to work, and recently the international community has appeared divided. Sudan’s Arab neighbors have been passive in the face of the extermination of Muslim civilians in Darfur; the African Union has blown hot and cold on Sudan’s behavior. China, which has a stake in Sudan’s oil industry, has sometimes used its U.N. Security Council seat to resist ultimatums to Sudan’s government.
Some of the ingredients of progress in Darfur are already in place. The U.N. is busy planning for a peacekeeping deployment, and a peace deal exists, at least on paper. The priority is to reconstitute the diplomatic coalition that has successfully put pressure on Sudan’s government in the past and that can clear the way for a U.N. deployment and hold the government to its commitments under the peace deal. Worrisomely, President Bush’s point man on Sudan, Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, is leaving for Wall Street, and his ambassador to the United Nations, John R. Bolton, recently refused to accompany his Security Council colleagues on a trip to Sudan. But if Mr. Bashir’s shameless outpourings are not enough to solidify diplomatic efforts to isolate his regime, it’s hard to know what would be.