British FM to visit Sudan as US proposes sanctions over Darfur
LONDON, July 22 (AFP) — Britain said it will send Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to Sudan next month amid mounting concern over the war-torn region of Darfur, as a US draft resolution put to the UN Security Council threatened to sanction Khartoum if it does not arrest militias implicated in the disaster.
The announcement from London came shortly after Prime Minister Tony Blair denied as “premature” a report that he had drawn up plans to send British troops to Sudan, amid increasing international pressure on Sudan to resolve the crisis.
Pope John Paul II also dispatched an envoy Thursday to urge a rapid end to the trouble.
The region is in the throes of what the United Nations has described as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, with a major famine looming and humanitarian relief operations hampered by rains.
The report in the Guardian newspaper prompted Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail, on visit in Paris, to say Sudan would withdraw its troops from the western Darfur region if Britain sends forces in.
“Let him inform us officially and what we will do is withdraw our troops from Darfur,” Mustafa Ismail said. But he warned the foreign troops would likely find themselves bogged down by Iraq -style resistance “and the same incidents you are now facing in Iraq are going to be repeated in Darfur.”
Blair however said “we rule nothing out, but we’re not at the stage yet (of sending troops) ….”
Straw will travel to Khartoum towards August 25, a Foreign Office spokesman told AFP.
“At the moment the plan is that he will fly to Khartoum and then, maybe, on to Darfur, but the logistics still need to be worked out,” he said.
Straw urged Sudan to take action in Darfur, where an estimated 10,000 people have been killed and one million left homeless in confrontations between rebels who rose up in February last year and government troops and their affiliated Arab militias.
“The Sudan army is at best passive and at worst complicit in these attacks,” he said.
The draft resolution put forward at the United Nations, obtained by AFP, said the Sudanese government must bring to justice leaders of the Janjaweed militias or face the threat of still unspecified sanctions within 30 days.
The resolution would also impose an immediate arms embargo on Darfur.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell was to meet UN Secretary General Kofi Annan at UN headquarters in New York later on Thursday to discuss the matter. Powell said he had “disturbing” reports that the “Janjaweeds were supported by the government”.
Initial peace talks between rebels and the Sudanese government have foundered and no improvement in the situation has yet been seen.
In Geneva, the African Union’s mediator for Darfur, Niger’s former prime minister Hamid Algabid, said he had held constructive talks Thursday with leaders of two rebel groups from the region, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A).
But he did not give a date for resumption of peace talks, saying “we have to first finish consultations with all the parties.”
The Vatican on Thursday said a papal envoy, German Archbishop Paul Cordes, had left for Sudan to press the government to reach a “just solution” to the conflict, and to visit Darfur with UN personnel.
The Vatican compared Sudan to “Rwanda in slow motion” — an allusion to the 1994 genocide in which up to one million Rwandans died.
French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier has said he would next Tuesday visit the region near al-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, as part of an African trip.
Ismail told journalists in the French capital “more than 60 percent” of the population in Darfur were against the rebels and that the Khartoum government was doing its best to disarm the militias.