US lawmakers meet Darfur rebels, visit Sudanese refugees camps in Chad

NAIROBI, Jan 24, 2005 (AP) — U.S. lawmakers who met with Darfur rebels in western Sudan and visited camps for Sudanese refugees in Chad over the weekend said they will ask Washington to push for U.N. sanctions against the Sudanese government.

The lawmakers will also be asking for a larger African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur as well as expanding its mandate beyond being just a protection force to begin enforcing existing cease-fire agreements, a Congressional staff member with the delegation said on condition of anonymity.

Rep. Ed Royce, chairman of the House International Relations subcommittee on Africa, traveled to Chad and a border town in neighboring Sudan together with Reps. Barbara Lee, Jim McDermott, Diane Watson and Betty McCollum, the official said, speaking from Chad’s capital, N’Djamena.

Royce will demand the U.S. government push harder for U.N. sanctions against the Sudanese government for failing to stop the Darfur conflict, the official said.

The Darfur conflict started in February 2003 when two non-Arab African rebel groups – the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement – took up arms in a bid for more power and a greater share of resources.

The government responded with a counterinsurgency campaign in which a mostly Arab militia known as the Janjaweed has committed wide-scale abuses against people it says are allied to the rebels.

Hardships including disease and malnutrition are believed to have killed more than 70,000 of the displaced within Darfur since last March. Many more have been killed in nearly two years of fighting, although no firm estimate of the direct toll of the war yet exists.

About 2 million people have been displaced by the conflict.