The Sudan Mandate
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
As the death toll in western Sudan rises and 1.5 million of Darfur’s displaced families huddle in camps, the United Nations plans to hold an “extraordinary” meeting of the Security Council next week at Nairobi to discuss the situation. It is the first time in more than a decade that the Security Council will meet outside Turtle Bay. The reason for the Nairobi meeting was originally to have been sealing a peace deal in the two-decade-long southern Sudan conflict, where Khartoum’s Islamist government pioneered the ethnic militia attack strategy against the largely Christian black population in Darfur. It is a racist and anti-Christian war.
President Bush, in his first term, made securing peace in Sudan his major African foreign policy initiative. He appointed a former senator, John Danforth, to oversee the process. Now Mr. Danforth is his envoy to the United Nations itself and is the prime mover behind moving the U.N. to Nairobi to address Sudan’s serial human rights crises. So on the face of things, it would appear that the U.N. is taking an extraordinary step in response to a desperate situation. In reality, moving the Security Council meeting to Kenya will simply put a traveling spotlight on Khartoum’s ability to brush aside the world body and continue open attacks against the defenseless people of Darfur. The peace talks that are supposed to conclude with a deal in Nairobi have been going on for more than two-and-a-half years.
The Sudanese masterminding of the decimation of Darfur’s black population has occurred while the Sudanese were sit ting at the peace table. While talking peace, they unleashed brutal Arab militias known as Janjaweed across western Sudan. Two U.N. Security Council resolutions threatening sanctions over Darfur have been ignored, and the U.N. has done next to nothing. As plans for the Nairobi summit proceeded this week, Sudanese police and government forces brazenly overran and attacked refugee camps, again forcibly displacing the thousands of already burned-out villagers. As Human Rights Watch has documented, the Janjaweed that Sudan was supposed to disband were absorbed into the police and government army and now “guard” the camps of the Darfurians they originally burned out of their homes.
One reason for Khartoum’s brazenness is its knowledge that it controls the Security Council through the Red Chinese veto. Sudan is a major supplier of oil to the communist regime. and Khartoum’s marriage of convenience with Beijing has paid diplomatic dividends at Turtle Bay. Sudan is convinced that U.N. sanctions will be little more than a rubber stick. With the U.N. hostage to China’s oil interests and unable to take action on threatened sanctions, only America has the political and military clout to give Khartoum pause. The African Union has pledged some 3,500 troops, but their deployment has been slow and they are not tasked with disarming and disbanding the Janjaweed. If Sudan deliberately embarrasses the U.N. and Ambassador Danforth on its field trip to Africa, Mr. Bush has a foreign policy test of his mandate for moral leadership in the world.