Britain urges UN sanctions on Sudan over Darfur
March 13, 2007 (UNITED NATIONS) — Britain wants the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Sudan in response to its near rejection of U.N. plans to deploy peacekeepers in Darfur, its ambassador said on Tuesday.
Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon with a variety of conditions on U.N. proposals to bolster the 7,000-member African Union force, now in Darfur.
Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry said that it was time to put pressure on Sudan because the letter from Bashir “amounts to a renegotiation” of earlier agreements.
“I would put down a resolution on sanctions next week on that basis that I would expect to get it adopted,” Jones Parry told reporters.
The sanctions, which the European Union has already advocated, could include broadening a no-fly zone over Darfur to an arms embargo and adding to an existing list of four people subject to an assets freeze and travel ban.
The Security Council in March 2004 imposed an arms embargo on rebels and militia but not on Sudan’s government. A year later the council listed four people subject to a freeze of assets and a travel embargo, which has not had any impact.
South African Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, this month’s Security Council president, said Bashir’s letter would be the main topic of a council lunch with Ban on Thursday.
“The secretary-general did express his regret that the letter and contents of the entire document seemed to raise questions about some of the issues that the secretary-general had assumed had already been agreed,” Kumalo said of his conversation with Ban.
Bashir based his objections on the Darfur Peace Agreement of last May between the Khartoum government and one rebel group, barely touching on a much more recent agreement he endorsed in November that left troop planning to the African Union and the United Nations.
At issue is an interim plan of some 3,000 U.N. personnel, mainly engineers, logistics and medical units as well as helicopter pilots. They would prepare for a larger African Union-U.N. operation of more than 22,000 troops and police.
But the Sudanese leader made clear that until the interim arrangement was in place he would not discuss the larger troop deployment, dashing hopes that U.N. peacekeepers could be deployed soon.
Bashir said U.N. troops and international police would best be confined to camps for uprooted people and should only monitor women from the camps collecting firewood. The women are frequently raped by pro-Khartoum militia.
On attack helicopters, he said they should only be used to protect African Union troops and “not include the protection of civilians, which pursuant to the Darfur Peace Agreement, is the responsibility of the Sudanese police.”
(Reuters)