Powell Maps U.S. Plan for Sudan Peace

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell announced Sunday that the United States will soon launch a new effort to end the 18-year civil war in Sudan, which is estimated to have killed at least 2 million people.

This will be the first U.S. intervention the Bush administration has initiated to help solve an internal conflict. It also underscores Powell’s intention to fulfill his frequent pledge to make Africa a priority.

“We’re going to work hard to bring a cease-fire into effect if possible. We’re going to work with all parties in the area,” the secretary told a news conference after talks in neighboring Kenya with humanitarian groups working in Sudan.

After negotiating a truce, the United States will work to achieve “peaceful reconciliation” of the sides in a war that has produced “so much distress” throughout Central and East Africa, he added.

A new special envoy, expected to be announced soon, will push either to jump-start a moribund regional peace effort or initiate a separate process in “a new direction,” Powell said. U.S. officials later indicated that the special envoy will probably end up designing a new initiative.

The Sudan intervention is particularly notable because of the administration’s reluctance to become embroiled in mediating conflicts. Only this month, for example, has the White House become actively involved in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, with its naming of a special envoy to the Mideast.

Meanwhile, among more than two dozen special envoys eliminated by Powell were two dealing with African conflicts. But partly due to congressional pressure to aid Christians in the south of Sudan, the State Department is now opting to step in.

“We’ve looked at the mess and decided to get involved,” conceded a senior State Department official traveling with Powell.

Sunday afternoon in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni heralded the U.S. decision to take the lead on Sudan. The African effort is “stuck” and has produced little tangible progress, he said at a joint news conference with Powell.

“I am very glad that the U.S. is coming in with this initiative. People have been dying since 1956, except for 10 years,” Museveni said. The current phase of the long-standing conflict erupted in 1983, when black Christian and animist rebels in the south took up arms against the Arab Muslim government in a quest for greater autonomy.

In the 1990s, the African peace process, under the aegis of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, brought together the clout of some of Sudan’s neighbors, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Eritrea and Djibouti.

But its only success has been getting the government in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, and the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, or SPLA, to sign a memo of understanding about ways to look at the future. The Clinton administration tried to invigorate the effort with funds in the late 1990s, but it stalled when the SPLA and the government alternately failed to show up for scheduled peace talks, U.S. officials said Sunday.

Powell cautioned that Washington is not starting out with a grand plan, nor will it “prejudge” what course to take before the new special envoy engages with all parties.

America’s top diplomat also called on the government in Khartoum to immediately end its recent bombing campaign against the SPLA in the south, especially in areas now suffering from the impact of a devastating drought.

Khartoum announced a cessation of the bombing last week, but Powell emphasized that it should not be just another temporary or conditional end.

“I think this is a good step, but it can’t just be for a short time. Bombing gets you nowhere, especially [on] humanitarian activities. This kind of attack is disgraceful. It’s reprehensible, it’s uncivilized, and the government in Khartoum should not be doing it,” Powell said.

But he said it was unclear whether the strict Islamic regime is interested in “constructive engagement.”

“They ought to stop bombing humanitarian sites altogether,” he said. “So we will measure their behavior. We’ll measure their response to our actions and see whether or not we have a basis for moving ahead.”

To help prevent the drought from turning into yet another famine in Sudan, Powell said, the United States will provide 40,000 tons of emergency food aid to be sent to areas in both the north and the south where food stocks have been depleted. About 17,000 tons are scheduled to arrive in the next two weeks.

This will be the first time the U.S. has provided aid to the north since a 1989 coup brought an Islamic government to power. Sudan has been sanctioned by Washington for its support of terrorists and by the United Nations since a 1995 assassination attempt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak by a group supported by Sudan.

But the drought, now in its second year, is having such a sweeping impact that aid groups warn that help may not arrive in time.

“It is usually in the second year of a drought that we start seeing people’s coping capacity collapse and people starting dying. In both sides of the conflict in the drought-affected areas, we do not believe that people will make it until the fall,” Andrew S. Natsios, the Bush administration’s new director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said Sunday.

Also Sunday, on the last stop of his four-nation African tour, Powell visited an AIDS clinic in Uganda, where an aggressive program has brought the rate of HIV infection down to 10% from 30% among the sexually active population.

“There is no war more serious or causing more death and destruction on the face of the Earth” than the ravages of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, the secretary said.

He announced grants totaling $50 million over the next five years to expand prevention and to care for 1.7 million orphans.