US says UN, Africa, Sudan itself hold solution to Darfur crisis

WASHINGTON, Sep 12, 2004 (AP) — The key to stopping the ethnic violence in western Sudan rests not with the United States alone but with the United Nations, other African countries and Sudan itself, President George W. Bush’s foreign policy advisers said Sunday.

“We can’t operate alone in this one. This is where we do need the international community,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said on ABC’s “This Week.”

He said the Bush administration is seeking support for expansion of an African Union monitoring force now building in Sudan. The United States also has asked the U.N. Security Council “to begin considering whether or not sanctions are appropriate to put more pressure and to cause Sudan to behave properly,” Powell said.

The proposed resolution, which would threaten penalties against Sudan’s fledgling oil industry, met with strong Security Council opposition. Diplomats said the critics were led by Pakistan, Algeria and China, which holds one of five vetoes that, if used, would kill the resolution.

On CNN’s “Late Edition,” national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the African Union, which has hosted peace talks since Aug. 23 in Nigeria, should “remain in the lead to get an augmentation of the African Union force that is already on the ground.”

Once agreement is reached on a way to augment the force, she said, the United States and others are prepared “to help get them there.” She left unclear whether U.S. money or logistical help like transportation would be necessary.

Raids by government soldiers and the Janjaweed militias have killed 30,000 people and left 1.2 million homeless in 19 months. The United Nations considers it the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis.

Powell caused a stir Thursday with testimony in Congress that the chaos in the west of Africa’s largest country amounts to genocide by the government-backed ethnic Arab militias against the region’s black African Sudanese.

He said Sunday the declaration did much “to focus attention on the actions of the Sudanese government.”

The finding of genocide was based on interviews by State Department specialists with 1,136 refugees in neighboring Chad, where they had fled from Darfur. The interviews found a “consistent and widespread pattern of atrocities committed against non-Arab villagers,” a department report said.