WASHINGTON, April 20 (UPI) -- A high-ranking State Department official recently speculated and later downplayed the suggestion the United States might have a part in any potential military intervention in Darfur.
Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick stressed the importance of collaboration with the Sudanese government on the deployment of forces to the war-torn region rather than taking unilateral action in Africa's largest country.
At a Darfur briefing held by the Brookings Institution last week, he said the "one... issue that always looms in the background (of deployment) is the role of the government of Sudan in bringing in any force, because you either get the approval of the government as the government did for the African Union force and the NATO support, or you invade, and that is a very big, serious challenge."
Asked to further explain the remark, Zoellick said the Khartoum government has thus far been amenable to U.N. forces in southern Sudan as well as NATO troops under the auspices of the African Union, which has a 7,000 troops in Sudan. But Zoellick conceded there exist "diplomatic challenges" for outsiders wishing to increase their presence in the country since such moves may spur nationalistic resentment.
For the United States, the story might sound familiar. Currently spread across both Afghanistan and Iraq, slogging away at the nation-building that President George W. Bush once maligned, an over-stretched U.S. lacks both the resources and adaptability for another military intervention. Media reports of Pentagon plans for attacks on Iran have mentioned only aerial strikes, underscoring this point.
Moreover, analysts say, Khartoum's value to America's "war on terror" likely dooms any movement within the U.S. foreign policy establishment to get tough on Darfur.
As revealed last year by the Los Angeles Times, Sudan has provided critical intelligence and assistance to the CIA and FBI. Although Sudan retains its designation by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism, it did not prevent Sudan's intelligence chief, Salah Abdallah Gosh, an indicted war criminal, from meeting with U.S. officials.
After more than three years since reports of ethnic cleansing surfaced in the Darfur region, relief efforts continue to underserve the embattled population of western Sudan. Complacency and containment appear to have become the central policy objectives of the international community in recent years regarding Sudan.
When a twenty-one-year civil war was tentatively settled in January of 2005 between Khartoum and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement in the south, more attention turned toward the Darfur crisis where deadly attacks by Janjaweed militia have continued along religious and ethnic fault lines.
Francis M. Deng of the Brookings Institution characterized the relationship as "marginalization... by an Arab Islamic core in the center against the periphery, which is mostly non-Arab, in not just the South but also in the North."
Sudan harbors six million internally displaced people, most of whom have fled violence in Darfur, where some 2.5 million people have been displaced and an estimated 200,000 have been killed, according to Carlos Pascual of the Brookings Institution.
Despite an aversion to military intervention, the United States, for its part, has made significant contributions to the humanitarian effort. Secretary Zoellick pointed out that the U.S. supplies 86 percent of the food to the World Food Program's mission in Sudan. U.S. aid also funds medical supplies, health systems, road construction and education.
