US willing to push for UN Sudan sanctions: official
WASHINGTON, May 21 (Reuters) – Washington next week will ask the United Nations to condemn Sudan for supporting militias that have provoked a refugee crisis and is prepared to seek sanctions to increase pressure, a U.S. official said on Friday.
The United States also wants Sudan to allow in aid to stem a mounting humanitarian crisis, the senior State Department official told reporters.
“Literally hundreds of thousands of people could die in the course of this summer,” the official said. “We have told (the Sudanese government) we are going to increase the pressure exponentially.”
The official said that with lukewarm support for sanctions from China and European and African nations, the United States for now will seek a U.N. Security Council statement condemning oil-rich Sudan, Africa’s largest nation.
But he said Washington is prepared to press for U.N. sanctions if necessary.
The United States also hopes power-sharing peace talks on a separate conflict in the south will conclude soon. That deal could become a model for granting some local autonomy to western rebels to help defuse tensions in the Darfur area, the official said.
The Islamic government has sought to crush a fellow Muslim rebellion in Darfur using militias of Arab heritage who have sparked a refugee crisis driving thousands of black Africans from their villages in what the United Nations calls a scorched-earth campaign.
In the south, the government and mainly Christian and animist rebels have said they are within days of signing a peace accord to end Africa’s longest-running civil war.
All parties, including the rebels in Darfur, have acknowledged the southern peace talks could help defuse the western conflict, the U.S. official said.
The United States has its own sanctions on Sudan but is under pressure from Congress to do more to punish the government and prevent the continent’s largest humanitarian crisis from worsening.
U.S. officials have complained that access to nearly 1 million people displaced by fighting in Darfur has been prevented by bureaucratic delays and time limits on Sudanese visas and travel permits to the remote region bordering Chad.
Sudan has said it will ease restrictions on aid workers’ travel to Darfur but the United States says it has been disappointed by unfulfilled pledges in the past and worries the crisis will not stop anyway unless fighting abates.