WASHINGTON, 30 May 2007 — President George W. Bush ordered new US economic sanctions yesterday to pressure Sudan’s government to halt the bloodshed in Darfur that the administration has condemned as genocide.
“I promise this to the people of Darfur: The United States will not avert our eyes from a crisis that challenges the conscience of the world,” the president said.
The sanctions target government-run companies involved in Sudan’s oil industry, and three individuals, including a rebel leader, suspected of being involved in the violence in Darfur.
“For too long the people of Darfur have suffered at the hands of a government that is complicit in the bombing, murder and rape of innocent civilians,” the president said. “My administration has called these actions by their rightful name: genocide. “The world has a responsibility to put an end to it,” Bush said.
Bush had been prepared to impose the sanctions last month, but held off to give UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon more time to find a diplomatic end to the four-year crisis in Sudan’s western Darfur region where more than 200,000 people have been killed. Beyond the new US sanctions, Bush directed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to draft a proposed UN resolution to strengthen international pressure on the Sudanese government of President Omar Bashir.
Save Darfur Coalition Director David Rubenstein welcomed the sanctions but said they might be too little and too late. “President Bush must not give further months to determine whether these outlined measures work — the Darfuri people don’t have that much time,” he said. “The president must set a short and firm deadline for fundamental changes in Sudanese behavior, and prepare now to implement immediately further measures should Khartoum continue to stonewall.”
“I call on President Bashir to stop his obstruction and to allow the peacekeepers in and to end the campaign of violence that continues to target innocent men, women and children,” Bush said.
Bush said delaying sanctions to allow more time for diplomacy had not been effective. “President Bashir’s actions over the past few weeks follow a long pattern of promising cooperation while finding new methods for obstruction,” the president said. “One day after I spoke, they bombed a meeting of rebel commanders designed to discuss a possible peace deal with the government,” the president said. “In the following weeks he used his army and government-sponsored militias to attack rebels and civilians in south Darfur. He’s taken no steps to disarm these militias in the year since the Darfur peace agreement was signed,” Bush said.
The Sudanese government bitterly criticized the new US sanctions. “We believe this decision is unfair and untimely,” Sudan’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Ali Sadiq said.
The US move also came as the Security Council seemed to stall at imposing more widespread sanctions on Khartoum.
Sadiq said the United Nations was not keen on imposing broader sanctions because Sudan in April accepted the first group of 3,000 UN peacekeepers to reinforce the overwhelmed African Union force already deployed in Darfur.
