Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 26 2006 (IPS) — Renewed efforts to get U.S. President George W. Bush to increase pressure on Sudan until it permits U.N. peacekeepers to deploy to violence-torn Darfur have failed to alleviate concerns among activists that his administration will impose harsh sanctions or take other steps against the regime in Khartoum.

Their assessment comes in the wake of final Congressional passage here Tuesday of the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act (DPAA), which directs the president to freeze the financial assets and cancel the visas of Khartoum officials believed to be involved in war crimes in Darfur.

Before final passage, however, its most potent sanction – a provision that would have permitted U.S. states to divest from companies that invested or did business in Sudan – was stripped from the Act, largely at the behest of the administration itself.

Passage of the bill also came a week after Bush yielded to demands by human rights and humanitarian groups for the appointment of a special presidential envoy on Darfur to work full-time on ending a conflict that has taken the lives of between 250,000 and 500,000 people and displaced some 2.5 million others – the vast majority of them members of African ethnic groups – since early 2003.

The new envoy, former U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Andrew Natsios, told reporters in New York late last week that the impasse over Khartoum’s refusal to accept the deployment of as many as 21,000 U.N. troops to the France-sized region could still be overcome, although he declined to elaborate.

The latest developments came amid growing concerns about what U.N. and other observers have described as a rapidly deteriorating situation in Darfur, where the government and Arab tribal militias, called the Janjaweed, have launched a major military offensive against rebel groups that refused to sign last May’s Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA).

The most recent violence has reportedly uprooted tens of thousands of people in North Darfur and has spread to eastern Chad, where some 300,000 Darfureans have taken refuge, adding to what the U.N. has consistently called over the past year the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The U.N. Security Council last month authorised the deployment of 21,000 peacekeepers to Darfur to take over from a poorly equipped and under-funded 7,200-man African Union (AU) observer force that has proved itself increasingly incapable of protecting civilians and even humanitarian workers from attacks by government forces, Janjaweed, and rebel groups.

The resolution, which “invite(d)” – but did not require – the consent of the Sudanese government to such a deployment, appeared to offer the possibility that the Security Council could unilaterally send troops even if Khartoum did not approve.

Indeed, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has repeatedly rejected the deployment of any U.N. troops to the region.

“The (U.N.) wants to make a pretext through the Darfur issue to control us and to recolonise Sudan,” he told reporters in Sudan Sunday. “These powers are imperialistic. We have to act to abort all this aggression against Sudan…”

At the same time, however, Khartoum has gone along with another Security Council resolution approved last week to extend the mandate of the AU force, which was to have expired at the end of this month, for an additional three months, pending further talks on U.N. deployment.

Sudanese official have also indicated a willingness to permit the AU force to add as many as 4,000 additional soldiers and police to the existing force and possibly to permit a small number of U.N. advisers to work with it.

But activists here express doubts that even an enlarged AU force with a token number of U.N. advisers can improve the security situation given the growing violence and chaos in the region. They see Khartoum’s latest hints of flexibility merely as a way to buy time.

“By keeping the AU there and talking about augmenting it, they are essentially preserving the status quo, and that’s their aim,” said Eric Reeves, a key anti-Khartoum organizer here, adding that even an enlarged AU force can’t possibly protect some four million people displaced in both Darfur and eastern Chad.

“Everyone I talk to on the ground says the same thing: The AU is hunkered down, they feel embattled, and they can protect fewer and fewer people. Unless we get some version of the (U.N.) force approved by the Security Council, the security situation will continue to deteriorate.”

He pointed to a statement by the AU’s head Alpha Oumar Konare in Caracas Monday as particularly ominous. Konare, a former president of Mali, a television interviewer that no U.N. troops would be deployed to Sudan without Khartoum’s consent.

“That statement is the nail in the coffin of non-consensual deployment, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of lives are lost,” Reeves, who, along with many groups here, has said the U.N., under both last month’s resolution and its 2005 World Summit declaration that avows a “responsibility to protect” victims of genocide and other war crimes, has the authority to intervene without Khartoum’s approval.

Africa Action, one of the activist groups that have argued for stronger action, said it was heartened by remarks by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a Security Council ministerial meeting last Friday in which she called the growing violence in Darfur a “profound test for the international community” and warned that, if Khartoum did not accept a U.N. force, “there are other measures at the disposal of the international community.”

But Reeves said that kind of warning, in the absence of other action demonstrating that the administration considered Darfur “a top-tier” foreign policy priority, amounted to “bluster”.

In that respect, the administration’s insistence last week that Congress strip from the DPAA the provision that would have permitted states – that have control over hundreds of billions of dollars in public-pension and other funds – to divest from companies with investments in Sudan served only to undercut Rice’s message.

With the signing by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of state legislation in Sacramento Monday, California joined four other states – Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon, and Maine û to enact divestment bills aimed at Sudan. Twenty other states are currently considering such legislation.