UN Adopts Sudan Resolution, Arabs Suspicious

The 13-0 vote, with abstentions from China and Pakistan, came after the United States, facing considerable opposition, deleted the word "sanctions" and substituted a reference to a section of the U.N. Charter permitting punitive measures.

This provision, called Article 41, allows the "interruption" of economic, transport, communications or diplomatic measures, which amounts to sanctions, according to Reuters.

The resolution, co-sponsored by Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Chile and Romania, demands that Khartoum disarm and prosecute within 30 days militia known as Janjaweed or the Security Council will consider punitive measures under Article 41.

The resolution also places an immediate weapons embargo on all armed groups in Darfur, where government forces and Arab militia (Janjaweed) have been battling a rebellion from some African tribes. But Sudan security forces, accused of protecting the Janjaweed as they rape and kill, are excluded.

The United Nations has been planning a peacekeeping force after a final peace pact in southern Sudan, where a decades-old civil war is ending. The resolution says the planning should also include Darfur, although troops are not expected soon.

The United States and its European allies faced an uphill battle in the Security Council, where developing nations as well as Russia questioned the 15-member body’s right to interfere in internal affairs and argued that punishing Sudan would make matters worse.

US Ambassador on the United Nations John Danforth said deleting the word "sanctions" did not alter the threat of sanctions against Sudan, an oil-producing country with promising potential levels.

"If you read article 41, it speaks of ‘measures,’ and it says these may include complete or partial interruptions of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio and other means of communication and the severance of diplomatic relations – so this is a sanctions provision," he said before the vote.

Different Interpretation

But Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail had apparently had another interpretation in mind, as he hailed what he called a "weaker text" of the draft resolution.

"We expect an attenuated resolution to be issued by the Security Council today," Ismail told the independent Khartoum daily Akhbar Al-Youm Friday.

He said his ministry had set out a two-pronged plan to counter the draft resolution – "either to block its adoption altogether or to strive, in cooperation with our friends, to remove from it such references as genocide, ethnic cleansing and other extreme points and apparently this is what we have so far succeeded in achieving just hours before the vote."

AU Role

This came as the African Union (AU) keeps efforts to settle the crisis in Darfur, where many people were uprooted from their houses into barren areas. The UN says the conflict the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, current head of the AU, said Friday that more African troops than planned should go to the strife-torn Darfur.

"I sent a fact-finding mission to Darfur and they came back just three days ago… (having) found a formal deterioration from when we met in Addis Ababa at the beginning of this month," Obasanjo said in the Ghanaian capital.

After delays, the AU plans next week to deploy some 300 troops to Darfur by the end of July to protect its team of observers and monitors overseeing the implementation of a shaky ceasefire between the Khartoum government and two rebel groups in Darfur.

Asked about the Khartoum government’s likely response to the deployment of further foreign forces to Darfur, Obasanjo replied: "Sudan is not rejecting the deployment of African troops."

Sudan had earlier dismissed US-led threats of military intervention into Darfur, warning this could create an "Iraq-like situation".

Arab Suspicions

As Khartoum faces rising pressures, some in the Arab world see the UN resolution as a US pretext for a fresh military intervention in the region after the Iraq invasion.

"Many would say that the US administration, as well as some European countries, have found in the Darfur crisis a long lost pretext to put the government under the sword of international sanctions," Arab League spokesman Hossam Zaki said, adding an embargo would not help resolve the crisis, but antagonize Khartoum.

The Arab world is still boiling over the US invasion of Iraq, and at what they see as an unswerving US bias towards Israel at the Palestinians’ expense. The arabs are now questioning Washington’s motives in taking the Darfur issue to the Security Council, said Reuters.

"How come the Security Council … and those with a humanitarian agenda are so active when it comes to such a situation, when they turn a blind eye to the miserable situation in the Palestinian territories," Zaki said.

Mohamed Mahdi Akef, head of Muslim Brotherhood, said Washington was using Darfur as part of a plan "designed to fragment all states of the region, the beginning of it (the plan) was in Iraq".

Under US pressures, Khartoum has agreed to a southern vote on secession six years after a final deal, a move which could divide Sudan into two states.

Some Arab writers and politicians are suspicious, however, that the US diplomacy is aimed at splitting the Muslim Arab north of the oil-producing country from the south.

Émigré Sudanese opposition leader Mohammed Osman Al-Mirghani said the situation in Darfur could pave the way for foreign intervention, "jeopardizing the Sudan’s sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and people."

The United States in 1998 launched missiles at a Khartoum pharmaceuticals plant, saying it was making ingredients for chemical weapons. Sudan has been under US sanctions since 1997 for sponsoring terrorism.

The United States and Britain had invaded Iraq in March 2003 allegedly for the search for weapons of mass destruction, none of which have been found so far in Iraq, raising fears the offensive of the country, which has the world’s second oil reserves, was based on false pretexts.