UN tiptoes around Khartoum in coping with Darfur
By Irwin Arieff
UNITED NATIONS, May 27 (Reuters) – A U.N. drive to cope with a spiraling humanitarian crisis in Sudan’s western Darfur region has masked a behind-the-scenes push by the Khartoum government to keep the world body out of what it sees as its internal affairs, diplomats said on Thursday.
Even as U.N. officials warned that some 2 million people in Darfur were in dire need of aid and accused Khartoum of turning its back on the crisis, Khartoum lobbied the Security Council to keep the issue off the council agenda, the diplomats said.
Council members Pakistan, Algeria, and at times China and Russia have backed Sudan’s stand, blocking moves to put the matter on the agenda or dragging their feet in deliberations, they said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Pakistan and Algeria, like Sudan, are Muslim states while China has business interests in Sudan and Russia fears U.N. interference in its own crackdown on Chechen separatists.
Putting the crisis on the agenda, rather than dealing with it on a piecemeal basis, as has been done to date, would let the council discuss the matter whenever and however it wanted.
The Sudanese have actively opposed this, obliging council members who hoped to take a higher profile in Sudan — led by Britain and the United States — to work around the rules, diplomats said.
“The issues have been aired,” said one council diplomat. “The agenda item issue is an irritant, nothing more.”
In Darfur, Arab militias are driving out black Africans in what U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland has referred to as a scorched-earth campaign of ethnic cleansing.
The fighting has driven more than a million people from their homes and forced another 130,000 into neighboring Chad, creating a humanitarian challenge that has become “the most dramatic race against the clock that we have anywhere in the world at the moment,” Egeland said on Wednesday.
Two rebel groups launched a revolt in Darfur in February 2003, accusing Khartoum of neglecting the poor area bordering Chad and arming local Arab forces known as Janjaweed militias to loot and burn the villages of ethnic Africans.
Khartoum rejects the charges, accusing the rebel forces of attacking state buildings, killing state workers and kidnapping children as fighters. It accuses the United Nations of exaggerating the crisis.
SUDAN PLEDGED COOPERATION
The 15-nation Security Council, in its most forceful statement to date on the crisis, called on the government on Tuesday to respect its commitments to disarm the militias and ensure humanitarian workers full access to the region.
It did so after Sudan’s U.N. ambassador, Elfatih Erwa, wrote the council pledging Khartoum’s “full cooperation with the United Nations and the international community.”
Council envoys backing a forceful U.N. response to the crisis pointed to their Tuesday statement as a breakthrough.
“Sudan is on the agenda,” said U.S. envoy Stuart Holliday.
The council is now expected in coming weeks to adopt a resolution authorizing a mission to assess peacekeeping needs in Sudan, followed by a second resolution authorizing a U.N. mission in the vast northeast African nation, he said.
While the top priority of such a mission would be to observe a just-concluded cease-fire in a separate conflict in southern Sudan, “the assessment team would have to look at the entire country,” Holliday said.