US Congress weighs action in Sudan’s Darfur

By Margaret Talev, The Star Tribune

WASHINGTON, April 24, 2005 — Seven months after President Bush declared that a conflict in a remote swath of Africa amounts to genocide, several members of Congress are pushing for more substantive U.S. intervention in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Displaced Sudanese women build a makeshift tut in Otash camp on the outskirts of Nyala town in Sudan’s South Darfur region. (AFP).

They say the West has a moral obligation to do more to stop the killings, rapes, destruction and food shortages estimated to have killed 180,000 or more people and displaced 2 million.

At least 10 proposals before the House and Senate this year address this two-year-old struggle, which has pitted Arabs against non-Arab blacks, nomads against farmers and Muslims against Muslims, and brought an agricultural economy to its knees.

The proposals include emergency relief funds added to the supplemental Iraq war spending bill, but also more controversial ideas:

? A long-shot effort to suspend trading of stocks for international companies with business in Sudan.

? Calls for enforcing no-fly zones, and for pressuring the United Nations and NATO to send thousands of troops.

? Authorization for use of military force by the United States.

A lack of consensus persists over how deeply the United States should involve itself.

The military is spread thin with its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other concerns include the risks in intervening in yet another Islamic conflict, the lack of pressing U.S. economic or national security interests in Darfur, and resistance from nations, including China and Russia, that have oil and weapons investments tied to Sudan.

“We, the United States, have to be realistic about the limits of our influence in this part of the world,” said Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “We have very real threats of terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons. While what’s going on in Darfur is also a very serious concern, it’s not a very serious threat to the United States.”

Said Eric Reeves, a Smith College English professor who has spent the past several years on leave as a full-time Sudan researcher: “We are talking about a country that’s right in the heart of Africa, on the volatile border between Islamic and non-Islamic Africa, between Arab and [black] Africa in a racial sense.

“It is very possibly a powder keg. It’s a reason for us to call into serious question the geopolitical wisdom of talking a good game but not really doing what needs to be done.”

The fighting dates to February 2003, when non-Arab rebels in the region attacked forces of the Arab-led government, protesting policies they saw as evidence of its oppression of their people.

That was followed by devastating, widespread attacks on villagers by militia groups widely believed to have been supported and armed by the government in Khartoum.

U.N. figures suggest that at least 180,000 people have died in the conflict; some activists say the toll is twice that.

The Bush administration has walked a careful line. It has assisted the international food and relief efforts to the region, supported monitoring by the African Union of a year-old cease fire that has yet to prove effective, and urged the Sudanese government to crack down on militia attacks. But it has resisted unilateral intervention.

Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick toured Darfur earlier this month and met with Sudanese government officials. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has yet to visit or to address plans for Darfur in detail.

Congress itself is torn over how to proceed. Several substantive bills on Darfur have yet to be debated.

Members of both parties are divided over the wisdom of expanding sanctions, opening a Pandora’s box by intervening in capital markets, or acting independently of the U.N., given the fallout over attacking Iraq.

Human rights activists say the African Union, with about 2,200 troops in Darfur at this point, lacks the manpower, tools and mandate to get the job done.

Atrocities are continuing, and starvation, disease and unwanted immigration into neighboring countries are growing problems.

Until January, U.S. officials worried about how their demands over Darfur might jeopardize negotiations with the Sudanese government to end a separate, 21-year conflict between Muslims in northern Sudan and a Christian minority in southern Sudan that killed 2 million people.

Since the peace agreement, as Khartoum seeks billions of dollars from other nations to help rebuild, some were hopeful about seeing a government crackdown on violence in Darfur.

“But that was January, and now it’s April,” said Sudan researcher Jemera Rone of Human Rights Watch.

Margaret Talev is at [email protected]