UN Security Council to vote Saturday on Sudan

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 18 (AFP) — The UN Security Council will vote Saturday on a US draft resolution pressing Sudan to rein in the Arab militias largely responsible for the bloodshed and violence in the troubled Darfur region.

China had previously threatened to veto the measure but UN Secretary General Kofi Annan came out strongly in favour of the resolution on Thursday, saying the council needed to take immediate action.

“We believe there’s language in it that they can accept,” a US diplomat said.

State media in Beijing reported early Saturday that the Chinese foreign minister spoke by phone with his Sudanese counterpart on the revised resolution.

Mustafa Osman Ismail told Li Zhaoxing that Sudan has taken new measures to improve the situation in Darfur and promised to “cement cooperation” with the United Nations, the African Union and the League of Arab States, the People’s Daily reported.

Li also briefed Ismail on China’s exchanges with other UN Security Council members on the issue, it said.

The United States circulated the latest draft on Friday, the fourth version of a proposal that hangs the possibility of sanctions on Sudan’s oil industry if Khartoum does not comply.

The resolution calls on Sudan to disarm and clamp down on the Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, who, allegedly with backing from the Sudanese government and armed forces, have waged a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the black African natives of the vast western Darfur region.

It also calls for an expanded presence of African Union monitors in the region and asks the United Nations to establish a commission of enquiry to determine if genocide has occurred.

At least 50,000 people are estimated to have died and some 1.4 million others have been displaced in Darfur.

Several nations have expressed concern that the sanctions threat on Khartoum might make the government uncooperative with the international community over the crisis.

But the United States has repeatedly insisted that the threat of sanctions was needed to get Sudan to act.

A similar resolution on Sudan passed the council in July 13-0, with China and Pakistan abstaining.

“Civilians are still being attacked and fleeing their villages even as we speak,” Annan said on Thursday. “I have urged the Security Council to act on the draft resolution without delay, and to be as united as possible.”

German Defence Minister Peter Struck indicated for the first time Saturday that Berlin might contribute soldiers to a UN mission in Sudan’s Darfur region, referring to the crisis there as “genocide,” in an interview published Saturday.

“We cannot sit by while genocide is going on somewhere on the continent” (of Africa), Struck told the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, becoming the first German minister to use the word genocide in reference to Darfur.

“The United Nations is studying the possibilities of action in Sudan. Therefore it would not be so stupid for us Germans to ask ourselves the question” about possible intervention, he added.