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Sarkozy warns Sudan of tough measures

Vaiju Naravane

World’s non-response to Darfur killings unacceptable: French President

— PHOTO: AP

A woman cooks in a nomadic encampment in Surmi, Darfur in this April 22, 2007 file photo.

Paris: Keen to further its renewed friendship with the United States and eager to return to the centrestage in world affairs, France organised an international conference on Sudan’s troubled province of Darfur where a civil war waged by state-sponsored militia has claimed 200,000 lives and driven two million people from their homes.

The conference brought together France, the U.S., China and 15 other nations but the chief protagonist, Sudan and other African nations did not attend. Khartoum reportedly boycotted the conference, angry that it was not consulted and argued that the French initiative would only duplicate efforts by the United Nations and the African Union. The A.U. stayed away, sceptical about the meeting’s purpose and annoyed at being kept out of the planning.

When asked by journalists if it was helpful to hold such a conference in the absence of Sudan, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner replied that Sudan was not at the table because it had simply not been invited.

Inaugurating the conference, French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged world powers to take a tough line with Sudan if it resists efforts to end bloodshed in Darfur, and said ignoring the situation was tantamount to complicity. “Silence kills. The absence of a decision and the absence of a response is unacceptable,” he said. “Sudan must know that if it cooperates, we will help it greatly and that if it refuses, we will be firm”.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the international community had failed to do enough to end the four-year conflict. She said it was important for Khartoum to deliver on its promise to allow the 20,000-strong A.U.-U.N. force into Darfur to bolster the 7,000 ill-equipped A.U. soldiers who have failed to stop the violence since their deployment in 2004.

However, experts monitoring the situation in Darfur said the French initiative and the spectacular popular mobilisation could damage efforts to stop the bloodshed at a time when real progress might be within reach.

An erroneous interpretation of the conflict as one between Arabs and Africans or even between moderates and Islamist extremists has helped mobilise the worldwide campaign, Alex de Waal of the Social Science Research Council in New York told journalists. “It’s easy to take this simplified construct of Arabs and Africans and turn it into something that’s meaningful, even though it may not be ethnographically or historically correct,” he said.

The simplification of the conflict in the media and by pressure groups has helped the Darfur issue become prominent in the United States, said Mr. Waal. But he denounced the oversimplification of the conflict in order to draw in the wider public. “A lot of the ‘African’ groups have defected to join the Government and a lot of the ‘Arab’ groups have defected to join the rebels,” he said, adding that belligerents on both sides are black and Muslim, with Islamists present in both camps.

Experts say that the Government in Khartoum instrumentalised antagonism caused by desertification to pit sedentary farmers against nomadic herders, from whose ranks come most of the Janjaweed militiamen accused of committing the worst atrocities.

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