Sudan, World attention is still needed to bring peace

Editorial, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

March 21, 2005 — The world is lagging badly in providing Sudan what it promised the war-torn country to implement its north-south peace agreement and to meet the humanitarian crisis that continues in the Darfur region in the west.

With much ballyhoo, including the attendance of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Sudan’s opposing northern and southern parties signed a peace agreement at the turn of the year. The pact came after many years of work on the part of international negotiators, one of whom was John Danforth, the former U.S. senator and ambassador to the United Nations.

The war between north and south, which pitted the predominantly Muslim Khartoum government against southern, predominantly Christian secessionist rebels, had lasted more than two decades, claimed many thousands of lives and displaced countless more Sudanese. Achieving a peace settlement was difficult, and it occurred only after many false starts.

Everyone involved knew that implementation of the agreement would require use of substantial international resources, both money to rebuild the country — particularly the south — and peacekeeping forces to oversee the fragile, tenuous peace. Big promises were forthcoming.

Now, a few months later, the chief United Nations coordinator for Sudan, Jan Egeland, after a four-day trip there, reports that only a small fraction of the promised support to make the agreement work has been provided. Humanitarian programs are being funded at only a small fraction of the level requested. Only 22 percent of the promised $1.6 billion has arrived, including a modest $21 million from the United States. The African Union, the only international body to step up to the plate on providing peacekeeping forces, pledged some, but so far has sent only a token number.

Mr. Egeland says that 2005 will be a “make or break” year for Sudan. So far it looks like a bust, with the north-south war likely to resume and Darfur to continue bleeding.

The United States and the rest of the world should have learned something from the 800,000 deaths in Rwanda in 1994, which was recently commemorated in the film “Hotel Rwanda.” But with American leaders distracted by the Iraq war and fiddling with Social Security, it appears not.