U.S., U.N. Raise Pressure on Sudan

Sudan’s government has “a very short time” to curb attacks by Arab militias against black Africans and to allow relief workers access to more than 1 million people displaced by the violence or it will face U.N. intervention, the top U.S. aid official said Friday.

The United States has circulated a draft Security Council resolution that would impose immediate sanctions on the government-supported militia, known as the janjaweed, and would leave open the possibility of tough measures against Sudan’s leaders if they did not take significant steps to halt the violence after 30 days.

“It is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world,” Andrew Natsios, chief administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said after briefing the Security Council on the crisis.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan were in Sudan this week to heighten pressure on the government to stop helping the janjaweed militias, who have killed and assaulted thousands of black Africans and driven an estimated 1.2 million from their homes.

Powell and Annan demanded immediate and concrete steps to disarm and contain the militias and to allow access for aid groups whose work had been blocked.

“We will not be waiting for a long time,” Natsios said. “We’re not talking about months here, we’re talking about days or weeks.”

For 21 years, Sudan has been riven by a civil war between the Muslim north and the largely black and Christian south.

In the briefing Friday, Natsios displayed satellite photos that showed the destruction of hundreds of black African villages and untouched Arab communities nearby.

He said they revealed a government-sponsored pattern of ethnic cleansing that had forced the displaced into crowded and unsanitary camps that they were afraid to leave. Men who have ventured out were executed on the spot by the janjaweed, and the women raped.

“The cities and the displaced camps have become prisons,” he said. “They are concentration camps.”

The U.S. is proposing a resolution that would impose a travel ban and arms embargo on the janjaweed, require the government to disarm and contain the militia, and allow the Organization of African Unity and U.N. monitors into the region. It does not impose sanctions on the leaders in Khartoum but contains an implicit threat of action against them after 30 days.

Council members are largely supportive of the resolution but say they will give Khartoum a short grace period to act on its pledges.

“The thing now is to tell the Sudanese government in one voice that they must stick to their own commitments,” said Gunter Pleuger, the German ambassador to the U.N. “Time is of the essence, because people are dying there.”

U.N. agencies and aid groups have warned of a large death toll by the end of the year unless more aid gets through to civilians. Natsios has said 1 million more would die if nothing was done, whereas if action was taken immediately, the toll could be limited to 300,000.

The World Food Program began an airlift of food supplies this week -- enough to feed about 300,000 people for a month. But aid officials caution that the impending rainy season will make the roads impassable and complicate delivery, and the rains also bring spikes in malaria and meningitis. Marcus Prior, a World Food Program spokesman, said 2 million people would need aid by October because no crops had been planted.

The U.S. already has 12 sets of sanctions in place against Sudan and has designated it a state sponsor of terrorism. Osama bin Laden once based his Al Qaeda network there before moving to Afghanistan.

Although Sudanese leaders have won recent praise from Washington for moves to end the civil war, the Bush administration has made it clear that the U.S. would not normalize relations with the country unless the atrocities were stopped.

The Sudan issue has gained momentum in recent weeks because peace talks between the Muslim north and largely Christian south have neared closure, allowing the world’s attention to shift to the mounting massacres. The Bush administration has received pressure from both the Christian right and the liberal left to take action.