UNITED NATIONS, 15 July 2004 — UN Security Council members resume talks today on a US-drafted sanctions resolution for Sudan’s Darfur militia but no action is expected before next week at the earliest, diplomats said.
The resolution would put an immediate travel and arms ban on Darfur militia, called the Janjawid, and threaten to extend the bans to Khartoum within a month if the government did not stop the killings, rape and uprooting of black African villagers.
Britain and Germany, however, say this is too little too late and the world should put an immediate arms embargo on Sudan if the government does not live up to its obligations. US Ambassador John Danforth noted there would be a meeting today in Khartoum between UN, US and Sudanese officials to see which benchmarks “they have honored or not honored.”
“And then we will proceed from there, sometime after today, maybe early next week,” he told reporters. Other envoys said a report from the monitors would probably not emerge until next week. In addition they said the United States had privately given the Sudanese some deadlines, not disclosed, which had not yet expired.
Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir promised UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan nearly two weeks ago to disarm militias, begin political talks with rebels and provide access for international aid agencies as well as send police to Darfur to protect civilians.
Russia, China, Philippines, Pakistan, Algeria and Brazil are waiting to see what Khartoum will do while the two sub-Saharan African members of the 15-nation council, Angola and Benin, have not made their positions clear, participants in talks said.
Chile and Britain, France, Spain, Germany and Romania, either support the US resolution or want the tougher measures. Sudan’s Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said Khartoum had sent 3,000 police to Darfur, intended to double that number and had arrested more than 50 Arab militiamen, according to an interview in the German Tageszeitung newspaper.
Darfur Africans have blamed mounted Arab fighters for violence that humanitarian officials say has made 1.2 million people in Darfur homeless, forced into barren camps. With support from Sudan’s military, the Janjawid are accused of burning villages, kidnapping and enslaving children, contaminating water sources and systematically raping women.
Two African rebel groups in Darfur rose up last year against what they said was the government’s arming of the Arab tribes they say burned and looted their homes and have been driving them out.
But Reuters correspondent Nima Elbagir in Kala in southwestern Sudan reported many Arab tribesmen say they have been unfairly branded as “ogres.”
“Janjawid is an insult,” said tribal leader Musa Hilal, one of the men the United States had in mind for a travel ban against those it says are wealthy Janjawid generals. Local Arabs said they fought black African Sudanese rebels only in self-defense and the atrocities were work of a minority.
