UNITED NATIONS, March 1 (UPI) -- Sudan, a North African nation one-quarter the size of the United States, has been plagued by conflict since independence from Britain in 1956. The infighting continues today in the western region of Darfur, but the Khartoum now sees external enemies on the horizon.
The top U.N. envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, said Wednesday that Sudan's leaders harbor fears of both the United Nations and al-Qaida. These fears, he continued, stem from the uncertain results a U.N. peacekeeping mission would bring if it were to replace the present African Union forces in Darfur.
"Politically we are in a bit of a stalemate," said Pronk, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special representative to Sudan.
"The climate in Khartoum against the United Nations is heating up very strongly... threats, there are warnings, there is talk about al-Qaida and there is fear in Khartoum, that is being used, that the U.N. transition will be not a U.N. transition but a conspiracy which will bring Sudan into the same situation as Iraq a couple of years ago," Pronk told reporters at U.N. World Headquarters in New York Tuesday.
"Of course that is a feeling, which is being manipulated by leaders," he added. "At the same time it's also a feeling which is true for many people in the streets of Khartoum, and in that very difficult situation we at the moment are working."
Pronk's mission was deployed to support the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed about a year ago in Nairobi between the government of Sudan and the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement.
However, it also has a mandate from the U.N. Security Council to provide some support to the 7,000-strong AU mission in Darfur.
Despite the peace agreement, violence involving the rebels, government forces and militias has continued in Darfur, prompting the Security Council Monday to consider sanctioning individuals deemed to be a threat to the peace or to human rights in the area.
The panel "expressed its desire to move forward expeditiously on targeted sanctions, which I expect we'll do shortly," Ambassador John Bolton of the United States, the February council president, told reporters after the Monday session.
"The purpose of the targeted sanctions mechanism... is to apply pressure -- and I don't think we should be ashamed to say that -- to people who are violating the arms embargo, not contributing to our effort to establish an effective peace process in Darfur and restore the deteriorating security situation there," he said.
Since fighting flared a week ago in North Darfur, a large number of villages have been attacked and burned, markets have been looted and people displaced, UNMIS said. Clashes between the Sudan Armed Forces and rebel Sudan Liberation Army are ongoing.
Pronk was in South Darfur, bordering on the Central African Republic, over the weekend, urging parties to exercise restraint and protect civilians, a U.N. spokesman said.
He had been expected to attend a Mar. 3 ministerial meeting of the AU Peace and Security Council on the shift to a proposed Darfur peacekeeping force supervised by the United Nations, but that session has now been postponed to Mar. 10.
On Tuesday Pronk also said that 300 people had been killed in one area of South Darfur since December by attackers riding horses and camels and backed up by military vehicles.
He also said he was "very concerned about what's going on around the border in Darfur" with neighboring Chad, where more than 200,000 Sudanese refugees have sought safety in the past three years from the killings in their homeland, adding that there was violence on both sides of the frontier.
The U.N. High Commission for Refugees said the agency was seeing "population movements in both directions along the troubled Chad-Sudan border, further evidence of the spreading insecurity that now straddles this increasingly insecure region."
"In addition to the more than 200,000 Sudanese refugees from Darfur who have sought refuge in eastern Chad in the past three years, we're now seeing indications that some Chadians are themselves fleeing in the opposite direction, to Darfur," UNHCR spokeswoman Jennifer Pagonis said in Geneva Tuesday.
"High Commissioner Antonio Guterres has repeatedly expressed deep concern over the potential for further destabilization in the region," she added, noting that agency officials were on a one-week mission to Chad to visit its borders with Sudan and the CAR.
UNHCR said it had reports of more CAR arrivals fleeing banditry as well as hostilities between rebel groups and government forces in the northern region of their country.
