While the United States, Britain, Denmark and France argued certain individuals should be quickly designated as sanctions targets, China, Russia and Qatar called for more delay, U.N. diplomats said after closed-door talks on the way ahead in Darfur.At this point in time, more than 200,000 people have been killed in this violence, and 2 million are refugees from the roving militias and janjaweed. The African Union has been unable to stop the violence, the UN doesn't have a significant peacekeeping presence although the AU is planning on turning over operations to the UN, and the US is providing assistance through the AU.
Tens of thousands of Sudanese have been killed and more than 2 million driven from their homes and herded into grim camps during more than three years of fighting in the remote western Sudanese region pitting government forces and rebel militias against non-Arab rebels.
The council voted nearly a year ago to authorize sanctions against individuals blocking the peace process or violating a U.N. arms embargo, and U.N. experts last December gave the council a secret list of 17 people it said should be punished.
The list remained confidential until February 17, when details appeared on the Web site of The American Prospect. Additional details were published last week including by Reuters, leading to speculation the 15-nation council would now quickly move ahead with freezes on travel and assets of those on the list.
The Chinese don't want to lose their oil sources, so they're siding with the despots in Khartoum to prevent further action to stop the genocide. Now, the American Prospect article also links one of the 17 named individuals to the CIA - Salah Abdala Gosh, who happened to be Sudan's director of National Security and Intelligence Services, who purportedly envisioned the Darfur genocide strategy. However, he also kept tabs on the likes of Osama bin Laden when he was camping out in Sudan during the 1990s.
There's lots more than meets the eye, but the regime in Khartoum benefits from the delay.
UPDATE:
The New York Times is headlining on its website that the situation in Darfur is reaching another crisis point. Refugees are streaming across the border into Chad, threatening to widen the problems even further. The UN is powerless to act to stop this as long as there's at least one country that threatens to veto Security Council action.
Arab gunmen from Darfur have pushed across the desert and entered Chad, stealing cattle, burning crops and killing anyone who resists. The lawlessness has driven at least 20,000 Chadians from their homes, turning them into refugees in their own country.Note the portion I italicized in the quote. And it's not just Arab militias involved - these militias are Muslims and they're specifically going after Christian and animist Sudanese. The Darfur genocide and ongoing conflict in the region has religious overtones, yet the Times is playing down that aspect. Curious.
Hundreds of thousands more people in this area, along with 200,000 Sudanese who fled here for safety, now find themselves caught up in a growing conflict between Chad and Sudan, two nations with a long history of violence and meddling in each other's affairs.
"You may have thought the terrible situation in Darfur couldn't get worse, but it has," Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, said in a recent statement. "Sudan's policy of arming militias and letting them loose is spilling over the border, and civilians have no protection from their attacks, in Darfur or in Chad."
Indeed, the accounts of civilians in parts of eastern Chad are agonizingly familiar to those in western Sudan. One woman, Zahara Isaac Mahamat, described how Arab men on camels and horses had raided her village in Chad, stealing everything they could find and slaughtering all who resisted.
Technorati: dafur, darfur, genocide, african union, annan, janjaweed.
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