Obama advisor Samantha Power tops policy review on Sudan

February 26, 2009 (WASHINGTON) — Samantha Power, a White House aide, is one of the leading members of the policy review for Sudan, disclosed New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in a column written from Djabal Refugee camp in eastern Chad.

Though neither Obama advisors nor State Department officials have signaled any change in direction in the US conduct toward Sudan, the review is under way and Kristof points out that “in the last Congress, three of the strong advocates for the people of Darfur were Senators Barack Obama, Joseph Biden and Hilary Rodham Clinton,” now the leading members of the US administration.

Power was in Darfur in 2004, a period of intense displacement and killing. She is the author of A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.

Kristof’s column initially said that the policy review was being “co-led by Samantha Power,” which was later modified to “it’s being conducted by Samantha Power, among others.”

Last year Power co-authored an article with John Prendergast, a former White House official and activist, advocating certain policy steps that include: widening the scope of UN-led civilian protection efforts in Darfur, engaging in an aggressive diplomatic effort to enlist certain countries into pressuring the government and rebel combatants into a peace process, and leading an effort to impose stricter, worldwide financial sanctions on Sudan’s leaders.

She co-wrote, “the United States must use all its leverage to turn up the heat and punish the perpetrators in Khartoum… the United States and Europe could also do far more to help accelerate further indictments, by the International Criminal Court, of those officials most culpable for orchestrating genocidal violence and obstructing the UN deployment.”

(ST)