US envoy says Sudan president refused to see him

Nov 3, 2006 (WASHINGTON) — Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir refused to meet with the U.S. special envoy last month because he was angry about U.S. sanctions imposed against his country over Darfur, the diplomat said.

The special envoy, Andrew Natsios, said in an interview on Thursday with Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum that Bashir had canceled the meeting because of an executive order signed by President George W. Bush that imposed new sanctions.

“I did not meet with him and we were told one of the reasons was the executive order and the new legislation the president signed on this, so it’s having its effect,” said Natsios, according to a transcript of his remarks.

“If it was not annoying them, I think they would have certainly have had the meeting,” he said in the interview, done as part of the museum’s “Voices on Genocide Prevention” series.

The United States has called what is happening in Darfur the first genocide of this century, a classification Sudan strongly rejects.

Earlier this week, Natsios gave Bush a grim assessment of what was happening in Darfur, where several hundred thousand people have been killed and more than 2.5 million people displaced by the conflict.

Natsios was appointed special envoy to Sudan in September and visited Khartoum last month with the main goal of trying to persuade Bashir’s government to allow a 22,500-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission into Darfur.

Sudan has so far refused such a mission, saying it would amount to colonialism.

Natsios said there was serious discussion among European nations, the United States and at the United Nations over whether a force could be sent to Sudan without calling it a U.N. peacekeeping operation “in the traditional sense of the word.”

There are about 7,000 under-funded African Union troops struggling to keep the peace in Darfur and one option is to let this mission continue but to be supplemented by non-African Union forces.

Another option is to have the command and control and military planning done by the United Nations which has more experience than the African Union in this regard, said Natsios.

He said Sudan’s government appeared to be “flexible” about accepting troops from North Africa and from other Muslim countries than from elsewhere. The United States has said it will not send troops but give logistical and other support.

“It is very unlikely anyway — the United States and the Europeans are not in a position right now, for a variety of reasons, to give large numbers of troops,” said Natsios.

He said the Sudanese government was not easy to deal with and frequently used “harassment tactics,” including canceling visas and expelling people.

(Reuters)