Washington – It has taken President Bush nearly three years to match his impassioned rhetoric about what he decries as genocide in Darfur with tougher U.S. action against some of those blamed for the suffering.
When Bush announced sanctions Tuesday, advocacy groups and lawmakers wished the president had been harsher and wondered whether it was a case of too little, too late. The violence has killed 200,000 people and forced 2.5 million from their homes since it began in February 2003.
The action targets three people suspected of links to the violence and about 30 companies in Sudan.
“Three people? After four years? And not one of them the real ringleader of the policy to divide and destroy Darfur?” asked John Prendergast, policy adviser to the Enough project, an advocacy group to prevent mass atrocities. “This will not build multilateral pressure, and this will not end the crisis in Darfur.”
Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, said, “They could have sent a stronger message months ago and saved many lives from being disrupted or lost.”
It’s not as if the Bush administration has been unaware of the bloodshed in Darfur. The United States has been working on the issue at the U.N. Security Council, and Bush has appointed special envoys to the region. The U.S. is the largest single donor to the people of Darfur, providing more than $1.7 billion in humanitarian and peacekeeping assistance. Still, the administration’s steps have not been sufficient to halt the violence in Darfur, an arid region in the East African country of Sudan about the size of Texas.
The conflict erupted when members of Darfur’s ethnic African tribes rebelled against what they considered decades of neglect by the Arab-dominated Khartoum government. Su danese leaders are accused of retaliating by unleashing the janjaweed militia to put down the rebels using a campaign of murder, rape, mutilation and plunder – an accusation they deny.
“The Bush administration has acted more vigorously than perhaps any other nation but has seriously underestimated what it will take to end the genocide,” said David Rubenstein, director of Save Darfur Coalition. “These steps should have been taken earlier and should have been stronger.”
Meanwhile Tuesday, the Sudanese government condemned the sanctions and called on the rest of the world to ignore them.
“We believe this decision is unfair and untimely,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ali Sadiq said.
His call found support in China, Khartoum’s top diplomatic ally and a key business partner, which defended its investment in Sudan.
Trade and investment are “helpful for the development of Sudan’s economy and will fundamentally help Sudan to address the conflicts and wars in Sudan,” China’s envoy, Liu Guijin, told reporters in Beijing.
