Powell Visits Sudan, Calls for End to Ethnic Violence

Clambering onto donated sacks of grain, Sudanese refugees strained Wednesday for a look at Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who came to tour camps and press the government to end ethnic violence and a humanitarian crisis he has called “catastrophic.”

Powell’s visit came as the United States increased pressure on Sudan with a draft resolution calling on the United Nations to impose an arms embargo and travel ban on the Arab militias blamed for attacks in the western region of Darfur.

Powell and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan met in Khartoum, the capital, during a visit aimed at making sure the crisis, which has forced more than 1 million people to flee their homes and killed as many as 30,000 over the last 16 months, is not ignored as the Rwandan killings were in 1994.

Annan, meeting with Sudanese officials, said that urgent action was needed and that he hoped “to make some real progress in the next 24 to 48 hours.”

The United Nations has called the situation in Darfur the world’s most serious humanitarian crisis. Powell has described it as “horrific” and “catastrophic.”

But those assessments are sharply disputed by the Sudanese government. Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail, who accompanied Powell to Darfur, said Tuesday night that “there is no famine, no malnutrition and no disease.”

Powell told National Public Radio afterward that the situation “doesn’t meet the tests of the definition of genocide.”

“I can assure you that if all the indicators lined up and said this meets what the treaty test of genocide is, I would have no reluctance to call it that,” Powell said.

In 100-degree weather, Powell walked through the dusty Abu Shouk camp as thousands of sometimes raucous refugees watched, some climbing atop a pile of U.S. donated sacks of grain to get a better view.

Several people told reporters accompanying Powell about relatives killed by the janjaweed militias -- Arab groups that have carried out a brutal counterinsurgency against black African rebels, displacing an estimated 1.2 million people.